The real LA is a algae covered ruin under 50 feet of water.
I’m glad Pirateboatville is getting burned to the ground. The “yarr!” nautical theme got old really fast…
Perhaps, but, as someone who thoroughly enjoyed the last Guild Wars 2 novel, it’s disappointing to see Cobiah’s work be destroyed so quickly and meaninglessly. There was something to it – simple, quaint, interesting, and endearing. Brave characters gave their lives to make sure that this multi-racial city would stay standing.
Despite the terrible odds that the founders faced in rebuilding the city and in defending it, now it seems like that might all be taken away – and for nothing. I can only hope I’m wrong.
I have a feeling they will only do moderate damage to the town. It seems unlikely that they will completely level it or their whole “LA will endure!” idea goes down the toilet.
Worse case scenario, we will probably see some building replaced and a lot of new updated textures with some npcs in new spots but it will probably end up looking like the original LA overall.
I’m more convinced than ever that this class should get a Fast Hand trait like warriors. I’d actually argue that should be no swap cool down for this game across all classes but that’s for another thread. Again, every class has gap closers, range, and CC options. There’s zero need to disable kiting as it’s a L2P issue, not a balance one.
Notice also the channel time of the skills. Fast and furious, or slow and powerful. This is what’s missing from the ranger longbow along with the lack of CC. Lightning reflex doesn’t cut it with the long cool downs.
Our ranger looks so slow and clunky by comparison it’s kind of sad. Also, +5 to them for not tethering the stereotypical AI “pet”. Nice to see some game devs are aware it doesn’t actually work as well as it does on paper and definitely doesn’t work in a game with no collision.
On the otherhand, that ranger in the video is just ridiculous. Is he using a machine gun or a bow?
That is the one thing I love about Asia’s mmo combat is that it’s all stupidly over the top. Everyone moves crazy fast or has absurd attack animations and equipment. It makes it all a lot more fantastical and enjoyable. It’s one of the things GW2 lacks (unless you play thief) and it becomes dreadfully obvious when you use the same weapon sets for 1000+ hours.
Do the developers really want feedback? If so, then I have a story for them.
Before I played GW2 I used to play Rift. The PvP there was not as good as GW2, but it was decent…at first.
In the beginning the PvP was decent. Then the developers tried to balance the PvP.
And so they buffed warriors and thieves.
And the nerfed warlocks and pyromancers.
And so the game persisted. Players clamored about the imbalance that existed, and even offered suggestions on how to improve the balance.
And the developer response was the same: we have to be mindful of scope (though the changes were typically analogous to changing one or two talents). And they did nothing. And warriors and thieves rampaged over the battlegrounds.
That was about 2 years ago.
The other day I swung into the Rift forums and saw the same complaints. Nothing changed.
Today, in GW2, I see warriors are overpowered and still dominating the meta, as exemplified by teams like Cheese Mode winning tournaments with double warrior.
Thieves are the apex roamer class, pushing out Elementalists and Mesmers from the meta.
And I see ArenaNet doing nothing to change this.
I believe history will repeat itself.
As long as people keep buying gems don’t expect anything to ever really change.
Makes one wonder why you still bother if believe nothing is goign to change. Just for the record, the ones complaining like us are generally not the ones that prop up the game.
Things will change somewhat, but major sweeping changes don’t seem like they will happen or will happen so slowly people will just start to lose interest before they are fully realized. I firmly believe that this games B2P model is it’s biggest saving grace at the moment.
I mean, it’s been almost 2 yeas and we still don’t have a new spvp game mode. WvW got a new map and it’s just more of the “zerg the local” game play we’ve always had.
If Anet had a real competitor that made them afraid to lose customers we’d probably see a lot more innovation and change than we have been with their only real drain being general player bemusement.
Do the developers really want feedback? If so, then I have a story for them.
Before I played GW2 I used to play Rift. The PvP there was not as good as GW2, but it was decent…at first.
In the beginning the PvP was decent. Then the developers tried to balance the PvP.
And so they buffed warriors and thieves.
And the nerfed warlocks and pyromancers.
And so the game persisted. Players clamored about the imbalance that existed, and even offered suggestions on how to improve the balance.
And the developer response was the same: we have to be mindful of scope (though the changes were typically analogous to changing one or two talents). And they did nothing. And warriors and thieves rampaged over the battlegrounds.
That was about 2 years ago.
The other day I swung into the Rift forums and saw the same complaints. Nothing changed.
Today, in GW2, I see warriors are overpowered and still dominating the meta, as exemplified by teams like Cheese Mode winning tournaments with double warrior.
Thieves are the apex roamer class, pushing out Elementalists and Mesmers from the meta.
And I see ArenaNet doing nothing to change this.
I believe history will repeat itself.
As long as people keep buying gems don’t expect anything to ever really change.
I’m more convinced than ever that this class should get a Fast Hand trait like warriors. I’d actually argue that should be no swap cool down for this game across all classes but that’s for another thread. Again, every class has gap closers, range, and CC options. There’s zero need to disable kiting as it’s a L2P issue, not a balance one.
Notice also the channel time of the skills. Fast and furious, or slow and powerful. This is what’s missing from the ranger longbow along with the lack of CC. Lightning reflex doesn’t cut it with the long cool downs.
Our ranger looks so slow and clunky by comparison it’s kind of sad. Also, +5 to them for not tethering the stereotypical AI “pet”. Nice to see some game devs are aware it doesn’t actually work as well as it does on paper and definitely doesn’t work in a game with no collision.
the next problem is. even if pet ai would not be crap.. powerranger has no “BURST” only sustained dmg. nothing like bullsrush+100B or similar combos on other class.
The other big thing is Bull+100b can hurt like hell even if the warrior isn’t full glass. You absolutely HAVE to go full glass to get any kind of respectable maul hit and a glass ranger is about the second most easy kill in the game right after maybe a zerk necro.
We already have a skill on downed where our pet gets us up, and so does another elite when time right, the spirit. The active should do something else. Like buffs on your pet are transferred to nearby allies or something.
You guys are naivë to think that pet rez on downed would stay in the game after the release of an elite skill such as this :-)
So your opinion is that they would kick every single Ranger in the balls in order to provide a single questionably effective skill to a subsection of the population?
They nerfed both pet damage and leash range (with no offset at all) just to placate one game mode.
Anet doesn’t give much thought to their ranger updates nor do they seem to particularly care what gets mucked up in the process as long as the other classes are happy.
Hey devs, I’d like it if you had balance patches more often rather than holding off for SEVERAL MONTHS and then changing only two minor things per class.
Sometimes you make good balance changes, sometimes you make bad ones. But it’d at least be interesting to the players to have changes more frequently.
I have to agree with this. The meta has been stale for far too long and the huge changes that we would see in GW1 where refreshing even if they weren’t always kind to our chosen class/es.
As far as I remember, the sPvP meta always required at least one guardian per group. Why should we consider the guardian balance to be almost perfect when the class has been a must have for as long as GW2 existed?
Because it means it is in a good spot and ANet should strive to bring the other classes to its level so all classes would be equally desirable to have in a group? As I recall that is what balance is all about.
And to me the Guardian feels like it is the most balanced class there is at the moment; so it could serve as the perfect example for ANet to use as a base when working on the others.
Except that’s impossible. There are 8 classes and only 5 people per group. If guardians are a must have then that means there is only 4 spaces for 7 classes to fill. 3 will always be left out and that assumes we don’t start stacking double or triple the amount of a single class per group. We could argue that different scenarios means different team comps but anet has shown that they can’t move past the conquest/zerg/zerk stacking game they created so the scenarios will really never change which means what is good will always be the same unless they mix things up and a new wanted/unwanted meta emerges.
I’d pay 800 gems per trait slot. Take my money already just give me GEAR and SPEC templates so I can change everything with a single button push.
This is already horribly likely so please don’t suggest it to further encourage them…
Yeah, take it easy with the money there! ;D
I know we would all be very much interested in such a feature, but let’s not encourage them to milk us even further!
just to offer some perspective here, but if you think about them milking us, the other side of that coin is you milking them. After all everything they develop requires work and money, you got to remember to pay them sometime for some things. So the question is what is an acceptable monetization strategy from your prespective. Where is it ok for them to get their money, and what should be included for free
Cash shops are supposed to be there for froofroo adons. Linking quality of life additions to it not only slows down their release till they can be properly monetized but skirts dangerously close to the way freemium games work and that is never a good thing.
Plus they charge $10 for one armor set. That’s 1/6 the cost of the whole game yet is clearly not 1/6 the amount of time or resources to create. I’d say they are fine with money and can afford to improve the game mechanics in a way that makes the game work more smoothly and more enjoyably.
Plus GW1 already has such a feature, given for free and would be rather embarrassing to expect us to pay for such a feature here for no real reason.
It seems kind of silly that we accept all this LS for free yet accept that things like increased stack sizes or removing sigils/runes (another ingamge feature of GW1, just say’n) should be things we have to pay premium prices for like game mechanic improvements are optional but an in game story that many people just do for the points is a must be free like one more zerg blob pve fight will improve the game in the long run?
Stalker’s Strike could do something more as it’s redundant with serpents strike, dodge with a weak attack + poison. Crippling Talon also needs a massive increase in the missile speed.
I would also be in favor of barrage’s damage doubled and it’s duration/pulses halved. WvW is a pain when I crit for 800 damage on pvt heavies and take almost half of that back as retaliation 60 times. I can lose half my health bar and never even be attacked by the enemy zerg while doing far less than an elementalist’s meteor shower or static field would.
More burst and less slow trickle of damage would go a long way toward fixing this and would make the skill provide more pressure than “whoops, better not accrue too much cripple”
I get that small pokes are our thing but it just doesn’t cut it with our only long range aoe skill when we are so starved for AoE in general.
The majority of roamers I see are either condition which negates toughness or thieves which will just kill you and ignore the pet so I’d go with what hits the most reliably and the hardest. That does tend to be spiders and dogs though so probably the best choice with it’s immob skill.
I would say it’s impossible since they are named uniques (not functionally “unique” but you know what I mean) and are locked at lvl80 which don’t drop for lower levels just as you won’t find non-lvl 80 versions of regular named exotics.
Although, to be fair, it being impossible means it’s only slightly less likely than it is to drop on an actual lvl80 anyway lol.
The “sour grapes” responses from some of the SoR people are predictable, yet still disappointing. I remember fighting against you guys when the league was on, and you had better coverage than we did at TC and usually came out ahead of us, but we still tried every time. I remember one week we got second place and everyone was happy about that.
Now suddenly it’s “we can’t win so we are running off to EotM”. I mean, it’s a game, do what makes you happy, but it still comes across as quitting. And it’s really not what I expected.
Ever since I started GW2 I’ve felt that the constant transferring around of people and guilds made WvW into something of a joke, and this is all part of it. I chose TC when I joined knowing that it wasn’t the most populous server, and that we’d lose a lot of matches. It’s possible that once SoR is finished shamefully throwing their matches so they can “on purpose” go to T2 that TC will end up in T1. And win or lose I will do what I can to fight the good fight, without making excuses or trying to find someone willing to give me gold to abandon my friends.
If you guys end up in T2, I’ll be rooting for our current nemeses, SoS and FA. At least they make an effort most of the time.
We don’t like pv door and luring bg from their keeps. What’s wrong with preferring EotM? honestly, we don’t really care what you or others think about our server, lol.
Sorry playing tactically and against comparable opponents was “too hard” and “not fun” for you guys. Have fun beating up zerker pve pugs.
call it whatever you want. if you want to come “pwn” us with your mad skillz you know where to find us. i haven’t seen any bg guilds in eotm. wonder why?
Because we didn’t rage quit from WvW over “playing for ppt”.
Good luck taxi’ing in your guilds onto one map and “playing for the fights” though. I’m sure the unorganized pugs in pve gear will give the easy good fights you desire.
Longbow #5:
This attack is ok but it would be nice if you could cast it while running.
Another nice idea is that you can cast barrage without groundtargeting, so you can shoot it over walls in WvW.
LBskill 5: you’re thinking of a very WvW orientated change here, I like this skill to be graundtargeting. Casting the skill while moving would be the perfection but I think reducing the cast time from 2 ¾ to 2 or 1¾ sec would be enough as well.
I didn’t meant to remove the groundtargeting but adding the possibility to use this skill without groundtargeting.
As example: If you hold your right mousebutton, your character will face and shoot in the direction your camera is facing. So if your looking in a 45° angle upwards, your barrage will go down at the maximum range. If you looking straight up, you will cast barrage upon you.
Shooting over walls just needs the loose “line of sight” that AC’s have. They still ground target, but anything short of a massive wall in front of you won’t keep the skill from working. Though, to be fair, barrage is weak as hell in wvw anyway when everyone runs pvt so it wouldn’t make much difference. Give it the Meteor shower ticks and then maybe…
The “sour grapes” responses from some of the SoR people are predictable, yet still disappointing. I remember fighting against you guys when the league was on, and you had better coverage than we did at TC and usually came out ahead of us, but we still tried every time. I remember one week we got second place and everyone was happy about that.
Now suddenly it’s “we can’t win so we are running off to EotM”. I mean, it’s a game, do what makes you happy, but it still comes across as quitting. And it’s really not what I expected.
Ever since I started GW2 I’ve felt that the constant transferring around of people and guilds made WvW into something of a joke, and this is all part of it. I chose TC when I joined knowing that it wasn’t the most populous server, and that we’d lose a lot of matches. It’s possible that once SoR is finished shamefully throwing their matches so they can “on purpose” go to T2 that TC will end up in T1. And win or lose I will do what I can to fight the good fight, without making excuses or trying to find someone willing to give me gold to abandon my friends.
If you guys end up in T2, I’ll be rooting for our current nemeses, SoS and FA. At least they make an effort most of the time.
We don’t like pv door and luring bg from their keeps. What’s wrong with preferring EotM? honestly, we don’t really care what you or others think about our server, lol.
Sorry playing tactically and against comparable opponents was “too hard” and “not fun” for you guys. Have fun beating up zerker pve pugs.
@Aggrostemma
The signet has a range of 600 and is an instant transfer. Tell me a situation where you are sniping from 1200+ range, need a condi cleanse because you have 6+ conditions on you and can’t swap the pet because this time the enemy decided to attack your pet instead of you.
You just got done switching the pet and another player came up to you and started attacking you. If you have never encountered something like this feel free to try some WvW where the pet gets instagibed non-stop from absurd aoe spam.
Because you can’t tell me what to do you’re not my real dad! YOLO!!!!!
But seriously, this is something anyone who has ever tried to command on EB learns in about 10 minutes. Pugs are pugs and you will only ever have a limited ability to control their actions. We are even less inclined to follow someone who is just another face in the revolving door of PVE commanders regardless of what they have to say.
Mainhand axe is a pure condition weapon, why in the world would you want to switch it to power, let alone associate it with ‘berserker’?
Axe 1 should apply bleeds and hit harder. Basically like shortbow #1 but without the stupid condition of having to be to the side or back.
The only thing that makes it a condition weapon is the 5 bleeds you can hit someone with in one attack. Chill + pet weakness is useful in all builds and the auto is trash no matter what you are running.
Still a bit of a stretch to assume someone running power would bother with MH axe when there are much better power weapons.
It’s definitely in a ‘hybrid’ limbo state at the moment but I wouldn’t say that it’s a condition weapon in the same way the SB or torch are condition weapons.
Don’t know whats everyone complaining about, new flamekissed looks much better. Plus it was ridiculous to have a CULTURAL ARMOR, available for every race in the first place. There’s really no before and after here, I never bothered to buy the original one because I simply didn’t liked it. Now I love the new and improved flamekissed.
Really ?
I think the real “Really?” should be directed at the people who prefer giant crown shoulder pads…
Ryan said it well, if this is true about the guaranteed on crit change, then you will also see a lot more conditions flying around. Also, could you link the official post where it says that it’s being changed to 100% on crit, simply because I haven’t heard of that change.
I think they listed it in the video. They didn’t say how they would change the Minor to Superior system though I suspect it will mean a change in cooldowns instead of proc chance.
Mainhand axe is a pure condition weapon, why in the world would you want to switch it to power, let alone associate it with ‘berserker’?
Axe 1 should apply bleeds and hit harder. Basically like shortbow #1 but without the stupid condition of having to be to the side or back.
The only thing that makes it a condition weapon is the 5 bleeds you can hit someone with in one attack. Chill + pet weakness is useful in all builds and the auto is trash no matter what you are running.
I pull a lot of condition onto my dog/cat all the time.
Some of the arguments here are so stupid that I simply facepalm twice.
Pet out of ranger for signet or renewal is not the games fault. It is you who sends the pet to the enemy. Just pick a ranged pet if you have such big issues with it.
Staying around in healing spring is not the same as “standing still”. The healing spring is a large field that you can kite around in.
I am always amazed at how many people can’t swap and manage pets properly. You should start out with ranged pets and then work your way to the most damaging ones.
Ah, the ever delightful “There’s no problem, just L2P” post.
I’ve also heard placing 1k bleeds + poison and burning on a 14.5k life cat when in combat swap timer is 20 seconds is always a good way to go. Not like the pet is an important part of the class or anything.
I Don’t think most of you are understanding. A Warrior for example can have 4 diff weapons on, with 4 diff sigils. 2 sigils with an on crit, 1 with on swap and 1 as a stacking mechanism like bloodlust. Where elementalist for example, can only have 2 on crit, or 2 on swap, or 1 stacking and one other.
I know I’m complaining about weak burst, but Maul can crit for over 10k in WvW on glassy targets
It’s not only on glassy targets, it’s on anyone/anything as long as it crits.
My maul build was guaranteed hit anyone w/o protection boon for 10k+ when crit, my record of maul is 19.5k vs a lv80 GC thief (someone got 22k , I haven’t got anything >20k yet)
GS can be specified to be an extreme DPS weapon for ranger, but it also casues the ranger to be extreme squishy too as compensate.
1v1, you miss with that buffed maul and you die.
xvx, you will die from the other guy/s hitting you.
It’s a setup that makes for impressive videos that are heavily edited but isn’t practical in any real situation unless you love feeding the armor rep npc.
In regards to burst. Yes, I think you can get burst damage with Ranger …but at an extreme cost. I have been watching a bunch of videos of different classes recently. What I have noticed, and especially with Thieves, is their target selection. You can watch them click on target after target in a zerg situation looking for the perfect victim. You can almost see their eyes light up when they find a Ranger ….and especially a Ranger with the Opening Strike icon.
It’s game over for that Ranger if he is “bursty”. Not only is he glass, but he is standing back from the crowd using his range IE a perfect victim.
If you go burst as a Ranger you have to be alert like a long tail cat in a room full of rocking chairs.
Playing a pvt/knight build in wvw and watching the thieves die because they though I was an easy meal and smacked into a 2900 armor wall and “Sick em!” gets pretty funny.
Not to sidetrack this excellent thread too much. What you described isn’t a burst/glass build. In a zerg scenario yes, a Thief that meets up with something he can’t kill quickly will just stealth away.
My point was that they think we all run glass %100 of the time and it’s hilarious when it blows up in their smug faces. Considering the rangers I encounter though, they aren’t too wrong to assume this generally.
Strengths:
Very strong at 1v1
Might be the Top1 anti thief class.
Weaknesses:
Bad at 1vx
Not good at escaping espcially when 1vx, (need very good timing + skills, much harder than some other well-known roaming classes)
You pretty much need Swoop and be clear of cripple or chill or you will never get away.
[(Spoiler!) How the hell did Tybalt manage to survive?!]
At the Claw Island story step, it is possible immediately after the cutscene when the risen take the beach and the doors close on Tybalt, to turn around and resurrect Tybalt through the doors (on the other side).
TYBALT LIVES!!!
That’s an illusion Tybalt. The real one got exposed to ancient magic and turned into a novelty backpack for all eternity.
My feedback is that coming from my ranger on guild wars 1 to the ranger in guild wars 2 was just about one of the most depressing gaming experiences in my life.
There’s no here or there about it. Just true. Sometimes I still go back to Guild Wars 1, to enjoy my Cripshot, MelShot, and my all time favorite, Magebane build.
I loved the new ranger right up until I started trying to do any not overworld pve or pvp where the pet actually makes me miss the old GW1 brick house. Hearty + call of protection + otogue’s cry = can withstand nuclear blast to face.
Those were the days…
Part 2 of a series dedicated to redesigning and fixing GW2 combat, profession by profession.
RANGER: "SPAM TO WIN!”
Outside of bad pet AI (another topic entirely), one of the worst factors ruining Ranger balance at the moment is how none of their attacks have any real punch to them. Across the board aside from a very select few skill, the Ranger’s offensive repertoire is loaded up with whimpy, throwaway, short cool-down, short cast-time attack skills. Most of the time, it’s very difficult to detail what the Ranger is doing until after the effects have hit you (unless they’re just auto-attacking). This sort of spammy blur of attacks is the kind of offensive paradigm that is unhealthy for GW2 because it undermines active damage mitigation such as dodges and single blocks. Because none of the Ranger attacks really have any “oomph” or are telegraphed particularly well, the Ranger just sort of throws skills at opponents which have to guess at random when they should maybe dodge or block.
By removing RNG passive procs while better defining and adding a little more power to individual ranger attacks, their presence on the battlefield will be less of a spam-bot and more of a mobile attack platform with unique, well-cued and potentially game-changing attacks.
part of the point of the class is to hit you with lots of smaller attacks, not really supposed to be slow powerhouses.
Except that doesn’t win battles. Burst/spikes win battles. Small packet spam is what conditions are for, not physical attacks, especially not when confusion and retaliation exist. Using a short bow and getting more retaliation damage than my own attacks are dealing is absurd.
Dealing 10000 damage over 5 seconds is always better than dealing it over 15 seconds especially when our power builds have little in the way of sustain. We could build for regen tanking but then your dps goes down the toilet and you might as well just condition spam which is more powerful in pvp than a pure power build at the moment anyway.
In regards to burst. Yes, I think you can get burst damage with Ranger …but at an extreme cost. I have been watching a bunch of videos of different classes recently. What I have noticed, and especially with Thieves, is their target selection. You can watch them click on target after target in a zerg situation looking for the perfect victim. You can almost see their eyes light up when they find a Ranger ….and especially a Ranger with the Opening Strike icon.
It’s game over for that Ranger if he is “bursty”. Not only is he glass, but he is standing back from the crowd using his range IE a perfect victim.
If you go burst as a Ranger you have to be alert like a long tail cat in a room full of rocking chairs.
Playing a pvt/knight build in wvw and watching the thieves die because they though I was an easy meal and smacked into a 2900 armor wall and “Sick em!” gets pretty funny.
hey Coarr,
I agree that the rangers lacks on demand condition remove.
The reason why Anet didn’t change this I believe to be that every class has one Healing skill that removes Conditions somehow.
For Guardian ist Signet of Resolve, for Warriors its Mending and for Rangers its Healing Spring. I am aware that this is a fickle argument since esp. Guardians have a ton of other active condition removes, but I think thats Anets logic.
For active Condition Remove:
For one, we have Signet of Renewal. ok, that will probably kill your pet but you can also just swap it and the conditions will be gone. Ofc your pet will have to be alive (which as you stated it probably won’t be) and its on a 60sec cool down.
I will make a few assumptions, correct me if I am wrong:
But most condition rangers will use a Torch as one of their off hand weapons in conjunction with the ‘off-Hand Training’ Trait.
so if you use a large Bonfire and try to trigger burning projectiles with it you will also encounter a reduction in mobility, why not use the same mechanic for healing spring? its not as easy as Mending, but if we wanted easy we would just roll a warrior, won’t we?
-> Hence I don’t see the ‘staying in one place’ to be so much of an issue.
and lastly: Why is active condition removal so important for you? With Empathic Bond, Singet of Renewal, Runes of Melandru and Lemongrass Soup we will hardly have any lingering conditions anyway?
And in scenarios where you have to eat a lot of damage while under a condition (e.g. one of those 100000 seconds immobilises -.-) most condition rangers pack enough Regeneration to withstand it.
When have you ever seen a warrior even use mending?
Pet being bad in large scale is not hard to fix. So how to fix it?
- Pets take XX% less damage from AoEs. I would say something like 75%, because 50% is still too little. Even 80% would be a good percentage.
A lot of mmorpgs has this, why not GW2?
If it’s 80%, that would require 4 AoE attacks to do the same damage as normal.
Let’s say your skill does 5k AoE. 80% of 5k is 4k, so the rest 20% is the damage, so 1k.
So, it would require four attacks of the same AoE to deal the 100% damage. If there are 12 AoEs coming at the pet, that would result in 3 full AoEs.
Pets will still take 100% from single target attacks.
Not singling you out, but just the general idea that you brought up because it has been brought up numerous times, so I figured I would make it a point to address my thoughts on it.
Should pets take less AoE damage, or is AoE damage too strong to begin with? For instance, if there is any difference between single target damage and AoE damage in this game, it is so miniscule most of the time that it would be hard to say “take the single target damage dealer over the AoE damage dealer,” when all other things are equal.
Traditionally, you would imagine that single target damage deals more damage than AoE damage. Like, significantly so, to the point where you have to make active decisions to do more damage to one target, or do less damage but hit multiple targets.
I think that in this game, AoE damage is so close to single target damage that it ends up being the true problem, that it’s just too strong, and not only does it present the idea to “stack” AoE to win in group vs group type settings, making single target damage less significant, but it encourages it to the point where pets and other creatures (ranger spirit, other AI summons in this game) simply don’t stand a chance at a certain point in the environment that is being created by AoE damage not being weak enough.
As a matter of fact, December of the games release year during a State of the Game, the devs even mentioned AoE damage being too strong and wanting to tone it down, but we never saw a direct change occur during the balancing process up until this point.
I’m just curious as to whether the problem is how strong AoE damage is, or if pets really do just need an AoE damage reduction (versus reducing AoE damage as a whole), or if it is a mixture of both those issues? Thoughts anyone?
AoE’s are waaaaaaaay too powerful for the recharge/cast times they have. They could balance this if they had kept the energy reasource in but that’ another matter.
It’s just easier to give pets damage reduction than to go in and recalculate every single AoE skill in the game. It also would help immensly in pve with “dodge out of this red circle to not die” mechanics.
I would also favor a system that increases the pets armor value proportionally to the amount of hostiles in a radius. It allows for the tanking needed to survive large WvW style conflicts while not letting them become unkillable jugernauts in small scale or 1v1 fights.
It still has the glaring class balance issues of wvw (some classes much better in large group combat than others) and would be a lot more fun with either reduced repair costs or none at all due to the mostly pug setups but its pretty kitten fun otherwise.
If you can’t survive with a Ranger you’re doing it wrong.
If you think they have the same range as other professions you’re wrong.
If you think they can’t tick 16k with Rapid Fire you’re also wrong.
L2P.
16k rapid fire? LOL, congrats on mowing down that upleveled theif/ele. +5 bonus points if they were still in their starter armor.
Welcome to life as a Ranger player. The only staff member that acted like we exist left the company a while ago.
Its not that, its that most threads involving the Ranger, even those with good ideas, end up turning into a flame fest by the second page, normally in the direction of Anet. This thread has actually been constructive for over 200 posts. Thats seriously a new record when it comes to rangers.
There have been plenty of constructive threads in the Ranger forum. People just don’t bother anymore because being civil didn’t do anything.
The very fact that they had to tell the devs to even look at this thread says more than enough about how much they care about what we have to say or suggest regardless of how we frame our ideas.
Stalker’s strike would do nice with a stealth addition and I still think we should have some kind of skill like Camouflage: Gain stealth for 30 seconds. Ends early on movement. 30s recharge
Good for both laying ambushes and general map scouting in wvw.
That would be so OP. you could sit in a keep all day long. You can’t sweep for it either since they just sit there perma stealthed
Just make it remove stealth upon taking damage or add another 5 seconds on the cooldown. Thieves have had perma stealth since day 1 in some form or another and it hasn’t been game breaking as long as you don’t leave dead mesmers lying on the floor unattended.
I like how everyone acts like the 500 badges just fell out of people’s kitten back before they were flowing like spice from the achievement point chests.
You’ve always had to wvw to get the gift of Battle. They are just fixing it so you have to once again and its still easier than it was back in 2012.
You casual peasants complain about this like if it would take ages to get rank 30 on WvW. You get rank 30 in a week or less. You guys are pathetic.
I’m rank 110+ and I love to WvW just for the fun of it. I just don’t see the point in this if you don’t need rank 30 to buy said items off the TP or to equip them or whatever. It’s just silly really. All it will do is to promote buying legendaries off the TP for those who don’t like to WvW.
lol, yes. I’m sure people will elect to farm 3000 gold rather than follow a commander in WvW for a week.
Well if you tie into that all the other fiddly bits of creating a legendary such as all the needed mats, getting your hands on a precursor, getting craft levels up. All of that WITH now having to get rank 30 for those who dislike WvW, yes, yes I can see how it might seem a little bit more attractive to some people.
I still don’t see how given that you either have to zerg up or wait 3+ weeks to complete the wvw map to get the exploration gifts anyway.
You casual peasants complain about this like if it would take ages to get rank 30 on WvW. You get rank 30 in a week or less. You guys are pathetic.
I’m rank 110+ and I love to WvW just for the fun of it. I just don’t see the point in this if you don’t need rank 30 to buy said items off the TP or to equip them or whatever. It’s just silly really. All it will do is to promote buying legendaries off the TP for those who don’t like to WvW.
lol, yes. I’m sure people will elect to farm 3000 gold rather than follow a commander in WvW for a week.
