Any other class can makes what rangers does but Better and more frequently! and they don’t need a build just to use an utility!
Wait, let me just quickly put my 10s duration water field for AE heal spam down on my Mesmer… ah what you say? I don’t have one and it’s one of the strongest combo fields in the game? You have to be kidding me?! Rangers useful? How dare they?!
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.
It’s called the Karma train. Log in on Friday, or late thursday, before reset and earn ranks PVDooring over and over again. Pop a wvw and birthday booster and you will get those 30 ranks in no time with no effort.
I know this is Carebear Wars2 and all but you already had to complete the map anyway. Not a whole lot more to ask to get a messily 30 ranks when we have boosters.
Spears and other polearms on land. For everyone. If ANet did that, all my griping and grouching would halt immediately, and I would just run around going “WHEEEEEE” poleaxing ambient creatures for like six months.
I feel bad for the guys who made the spears. They are the one weapon set that looks the best overall and they are only ever used in the most avoided and hated combat in the game.
Imagine how OP conditions would become if you could hit a player with 5 separate stacks of 15 bleeds each.
Sooo…. basically, imagine how OP it would be for one player to be focused fired by 5 other players.
If you’re in that situation, you are dead, whether it’s conditions or power is irrelevant.
You can kite attacks. Unless you have massive condition cleanse you are just going to be instagib’d by the bleeds. Which also brings up the idea of how exactly are cleanses supposed to work when you have multiple stacks of conditions with their own orders?
How am I supposed to keep track of all the crap affecting me? WvW zerging is already enough of a pain without 30+ individual condition timers on my screen.
I personally have always felt that combo fields on traps shouldn’t have been a thing in the first place (let alone being further implemented now). You can’t control when they are going to go off. You can only guess. As long as combo fields can overwrite other combo fields, it’s a bit of a nuisance when running traps might accidentally overwrite an ally’s field just because some red name runs in. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.
They should buff traps in some other way other than giving them combo fields and give us more attacks that apply those fields instead… attacks that apply direct targeting rather than utilizing an undetermined delay. Even adding a second skill option to traps that allows them to be manually triggered would help.
They all need massively better direct damage scaling instead. I’d love them to be a good source of aoe spike damage (a thing virtually non-existant on the ranger) if I slot for the appropriate stats.
I think a big part of the problem is trying to make this work but also keeping the system from affecting players themselves. Imagine how OP conditions would become if you could hit a player with 5 separate stacks of 15 bleeds each.
I think it also boils down to a server capacity issue. Large world fights lag enough as is. Things could get a whole lot worse if the system has to suddenly keep track of several condition stacks per player, on top of calculating durations along with the regular damage packets from the attacks themselves.
Not saying this shouldn’t be fixed, but this may be one of those rare times when something isn’t being done because it’s genuinely a difficult thing for anet to tackle how people want it.
The problem is all those alternatives, regardless of how well they would solve the problem, require more work and testing than simply nerfing zerkers.
After over a year and a half I can say with confidence that (the GW2) Anet almost always opts for the “sweep it under the rug/bandaid” fix rather than substantive retools of game mechanics to solve problems.
They could have put in randomly generated alternatives to the scripted mobs in dungeons that had low life but massive armor to make conditions viable or boss fights that were a large group of mobs rather than one so you couldn’t just dodge telegraphed attacks to survive to make PVT attractive. Those, however, require a lot more work than just reducing zerk’s dps potential.
I don’t know why people still expect anything big to happen. These people are a joke. I’m obviously a bit biased, I play and love Minion Master necros, but they’re only good for 1v1. They suck in teams, they suck in wvw, they suck in just about everything else… They don’t scale with armor tiers (ascended) get 1 shot by aoes they can’t dodge. Basically the entire game, mostly useless, only pretty good for 1v1 (mostly against nubs, not even pro players).
Minion master:
Putrid explosion now blockable, shaved 5% of the minion damage boost from Training of the master, nerfing Vampiric master by 10%.
Warrior:
The king of every kitten part of the game and played by most of the devs, and known for the most hated heal in the entire game.
Healing signet -8% hps, but we want to bring up the active to make more useful…
Really? Minion masters were the issue, when the top 50 tpvp are dominated by Guardian bunks, warriors of all flavors, thieves, spirit rangers and aoe condi spammers (collectively, this is about what every major tpvp team consists of, 1 of each). It’s just my one, biased, but prime example of them having no idea. x.X
exactly they nerf something about the warrior and then buff something to compensate. where was the wvw mesmers compensation when anet nerfed confusion dmg by 50% and bb trait in one patch?
every other patch after that all we saw was nerfs and nothing to compensate and now we got the veilbot duty, because no build and nothing works in wvw raids for mesmers. veilveil veil, portal this portal that, veil, tw this and dont die, while not dealing dmg. great job balancing fair……
I’d love for rangers to have the kind of WvW utility veil, null field, time warp, and portal bring. Mesmers may not be action packed but at least it’s an indispensable class. A zerg with no rangers is probably better off than an equally sized one with rangers in it.
Problem is… you need one Mesmer per zerg to do all that. So yes, we may have on guaranteed slot. Wahey, lucky us!
Try that on a T1 zerg. We frequently need more than one mes to port the entire group and multiple veils/chaos fields are always better than one. Lets not forget golem porting that can need several to get right.
I don’t know why people still expect anything big to happen. These people are a joke. I’m obviously a bit biased, I play and love Minion Master necros, but they’re only good for 1v1. They suck in teams, they suck in wvw, they suck in just about everything else… They don’t scale with armor tiers (ascended) get 1 shot by aoes they can’t dodge. Basically the entire game, mostly useless, only pretty good for 1v1 (mostly against nubs, not even pro players).
Minion master:
Putrid explosion now blockable, shaved 5% of the minion damage boost from Training of the master, nerfing Vampiric master by 10%.
Warrior:
The king of every kitten part of the game and played by most of the devs, and known for the most hated heal in the entire game.
Healing signet -8% hps, but we want to bring up the active to make more useful…
Really? Minion masters were the issue, when the top 50 tpvp are dominated by Guardian bunks, warriors of all flavors, thieves, spirit rangers and aoe condi spammers (collectively, this is about what every major tpvp team consists of, 1 of each). It’s just my one, biased, but prime example of them having no idea. x.X
exactly they nerf something about the warrior and then buff something to compensate. where was the wvw mesmers compensation when anet nerfed confusion dmg by 50% and bb trait in one patch?
every other patch after that all we saw was nerfs and nothing to compensate and now we got the veilbot duty, because no build and nothing works in wvw raids for mesmers. veilveil veil, portal this portal that, veil, tw this and dont die, while not dealing dmg. great job balancing fair……
I’d love for rangers to have the kind of WvW utility veil, null field, time warp, and portal bring. Mesmers may not be action packed but at least it’s an indispensable class. A zerg with no rangers is probably better off than an equally sized one with rangers in it.
im not asking about the item, im attempting to get people to learn about it and hype it up, and ask the simple question of can we get it put in the game.
Most people have known about the idea of using minipets to battle since launch with the mini pet arena on the beach south’ish of the WvW gates in LA. I’m not sure if the two npc still have their pokemon minipets in it facing one another but they used to be there implying that was where it would be located.
My point was that it’s likely a long since abandoned idea from the early incarnations of the game. You could try to get a campaign for it going but I wouldn’t hold your breath.
It also doesn’t help that the vast majority of mini’s are acquired in the gem store and have rarities attached to them making any kind of difference in power a very difficult thing to work with.
More HP and thoughness dont fix anything. It would help at the moment, but what if there were new runes, or new weapon sets, the HP need to be increased even more.
And what about wvw roaming? The spirits cant be killed.
So? A spirit build isn’t going to win against most wvw roaming builds anyway. If it could people would be using it already. We all run condi/regen tank because it’s just better, not because of the mortality of spirits.
Sounds like a relic from before launch when there was supposed to be a lot more features than we have before they got axed to facilitate an earlier release.
Functional pets would make us the meta? Ha, that’s rich. We are consistently balanced under the assumption that our pet has 100% up time and flawless functionality.
Making the pet work would give us the power/utility anet only thinks we have and would in no way make us “OP” or “the new meta”
The big change for ranger is they are going to change the class name from “ranger” to “petter” or “farmer”. This way when people who are new to the game choose a class they will have a good description of what we actually do. They may also release the new “Swords to Plowshare” ranger elite. Which turns our weapons into mining picks, harvesting sickles and logging axes.
Would probably do more damage than our current Nerfbat gear…
The description of the dye packs in the gem store is pretty darn explanatory.
‘Contains one random armor dye from a pool of 25 colors that includes six new, exclusive colors.’
At least 19/25 chances to get a dye other than one of the exclusive ones. I guess people don’t read what they are actually buying. You can’t really blame ArenaNet for that.
Which would make sense it every dye had the same chance to spawn. The kittenedly high TP price of the F&F dyes says this is absolutely not true.
I’m sorry, but all I see is scraps being tossed at us. Think of it, a few months back the dev’s said that the sword rooting you in place was intended and had a function and that they would not be changing it. Now all of a sudden they are talking about fixing the rooting on the sword? They are contradicting themselves. It’s also funny how they are planning the big patch to be in March instead of February like it should have been. Funny how they are putting the patch just before the release of ESO. Trying to see if they can keep as many players as they can with this ‘new’ toy of non-rooting sword attack. Last year they couldn’t care less about us and sword or pet, when the game first came out we didn’t see one single update while everyone else got buffs. If they where serious about working on ranger’s and getting the class up to par, they’d be working on the kittening pet issue, not the low hanging easy fruit of sword rooting you which I call bullkitten on ‘some complex back end reason’. They said it was done that way on purpose, it was designed to root you. So it should be an easy code to fix since they coded it to root you. Unless Anet wants to come on here and say that they lied to us when they said sword is working as intended. Which makes you wonder what else they are lieing to us about…hmmmm, pets maybe?
I believe them when they say it’s a game mechanics thing. Pets use crappy mob AI, queue skills on the server end and you can’t dodge or strafe in the middle of any skill that changes your position (leap, port) not just the leap on the sword.
I also, however, believe that they have known about these issues for some time and aren’t willing to put in the effort required to fix them in any meaningful way.
Well, as I understand it pets and AI and the whole rooting change on sword are really tough coding challenges. So, it is very hard to predict when a “breakthrough” will come.
On the other hand, a series of tweaks and swaps in skills and traits to get better balance is absolutely what I am expecting to start seeing in March for rangers. The only real question I have from listening to the podcasts is will it be in a series of evolutionary steps or will they take the risk of the problems with one revolutionary (big change) sweep at the ranger?
If it were any other company I would take them at their word and be very excited. Being that this is Anet, I’m much more apprehensive since most of our big changes ended up being massive nerfs (Sb range, pet damage, no more quickness on pet swap) or just tiny tweaks to a lot of things that does nothing to fix anything.
As it is, I’m half expecting them to break the sword when they “fix” it and remove the leap entirely or nerf it’s dps or some such nonsense.
They are completely capable of surprising me but frankly I’d tell anyone to not hold their breath.
When we are running venom sharing, people we hit are rooted for over 20 seconds. Rooted from first contact to dead. For those saying all they have to do is remove the condition. Well, they have every other condition on them covering that root.
You know you are describing a single target being attacked by a group of 5 players?
I’d call imbalance if they wouldn’t go down easily.
They die because they have a 20 sec stunlock keeping them from kiting to avoid damage and maneuver with their group. A single person can kite a group easily with the right skills and ability. They can’t do that, however, if they are forced to stand in one spot and get steam rolled.
How about anet stops touching what we already have and ADD some counterplay to all professions that lack it?
I mean, adding skills and traits that could temporarily shut down combat advantages would not only increase build diversity but make combat less stale. The way they go about balance is like hitting a totaled motorcycle back into shape.
I will agree that, in theory, nerfing everything will increase build diversity because whatever you choose is going to suck around the same severity. However, arenanet has not nerfed everything and has thusly contributed to the changes in the meta.
So I shall say this again…. leave what isn’t broken alone and start adding some more skills. If those new skill need a slight tap with nerf bat, then by all means do so but understand that breaking everything is not your only option.
^This is what almost every developer for online games (balance requiring games) does wrong. No idea why. No idea whether it will ever change.
It won’t because tearing down one good thing instead of building up everything around it is the easy, no effort way to balance games.
One way results in a more diverse, enjoyable game experience but requires more effort and planning. The other is much easier and we all just forget about it a month later no matter how hard they screw us over. You will get the occasional gripe but people either leave or just accept it with far more choosing the latter.
They go through with this, people will kitten and moan on the forums for a few weeks, and then we will never hear about it again because zerk will still the best for pve. It’ll be slower but people will just acclimate to the point that they don’t even notice it anymore.
A while ago there was a glitch that gave people the ability to zoom out further.
It made arrow cards horribly OP, i realy don’t want to go back to that.
then fix arrow carts.
Adding a line of sight requirement would make them just as useless as ballistas.
kittening up a whole game mode for something that no one has yet put a real reason for needing is silly.
If you deal actual damage, you will get revealed. Thieves can do all their BS because the skills don’t actually cause direct damage.
So you think something that triggers from my dodge & causes you dmg should apply reveal on me?
Shouldn’t that apply to deceptive evasion clones as well?
I don’t even think stealth while in combat should be in the game at all.
As far as the clones deal, I can only assume that it works on an entity basis. You reveal because you caused the damage. The mes doesn’t reveal because it was the mob clone that did the damage.
no. i strongly disagree.
the different health values are good, and working as intended.
if anything, they serve as a difficulty check for the professions.
easy mode – High (Warrior, Necromancer) – 18.372 HP
normal mode – Medium (Ranger, Engineer, Mesmer) – 15.082 HP
hard mode – Low (Thief, Guardian, Elementalist) – 10.805 HP
i firmly believe that the base health values are a core game play mechanic and should not be tampered with, ever.
Guardian is hard mode? lol that’s a good one.
at least it is hard mode for me. i can play my guardian okay-ishly in open world PvE, but for sPvP it is a big no no for me.
please try to understand that not everyone has the same skill level when playing online games.
Then feel free to not troll the forums presenting opinions on class difficulty as fact that should be balanced around.
no. i strongly disagree.
the different health values are good, and working as intended.
if anything, they serve as a difficulty check for the professions.
easy mode – High (Warrior, Necromancer) – 18.372 HP
normal mode – Medium (Ranger, Engineer, Mesmer) – 15.082 HP
hard mode – Low (Thief, Guardian, Elementalist) – 10.805 HP
i firmly believe that the base health values are a core game play mechanic and should not be tampered with, ever.
You will not see as high BURST numbers on a ranger, however you will see high damage, consistently. So while you cant hope to do 30k strikes every 10-15 seconds, you can expect a constant stream of 3-4k strikes.
lol so can the warrior. This “sustained dps” myth really needs to die already…
Been asked before. Probably not due to the clipping issues.
clipping issues? We have loads of those. One more couldnt hurt if it gave people what they wanted.
They would have to make them work on every armor in the game, on every race in the game. Their engine is ancient (or at least performs like it)by gaming standards and would just “NOPE!” into BSOD if they tried to do full cloth sim to make it work. That leaves animating flowing cloth for the mentioned armors and races. You may not care but we both know that if they did it that way the forums would be nothing but
OMG FIX CPAE CLIPPING!!1!
Why is my guild logo obscured by my armor?
OMG another item that looks liek crap on charr!!
Anet doesn’t want that and most us probably wouldn’t want to deal with it.
Why is this such a massive concern? It’s not as though warriors are in so bad a place that no one will ever play warrior in Guild War(ior)s 2 again if you do nerf them out of the meta. They’d still be the most powerful profession for the vast majority of the game.
I really can’t believe people write stuff like this…
So nerfing them into being completely unusable in a meta of the game (for example, PvP, in which we actually were completely useless for a year), thereby destroying the fun for loads of players who play warrior in that field, is perfectly fine? Because they should then just play PvE because a warrior can be mediocre in that? Or reroll a viable PvP class?
Warriors are one nerf away from where they were 1 year ago.
The fact that most people play warriors (which was true from the start) is because the warrior profession has been popular troughout the history of gaming. And in gw2, it is easy to become reasonably good with a warrior. Try to master it though, and you will soon find it lacking against experienced players on any other class, except ranger.
Then again, becoming reasonably good is easy in PvE, with any profession.
A class is popular in an MMO for aesthetic reasons? Ha, that’s a good one…
Condition rangers run apoth/dire (obviosly no dire in spvp) with s/d-a/t. You can easily stack bleeds with axe2, dagger5 and geo sigils. You also get fair superior CC than on the SB.
That build’s problem is that it is too much melee centered. Most condition builds are ranged because you need to kite your opponent.
Even if Axe2 is ranged, you need to stay melee to get the most out of it. Torch is decent is sPvP (I run it on my Ranger in PvP), but every decent player will know how to deal with it.
All in all, the build you mentioned is certainly strong, but the added Vitality provided by Dire is needed in that build, because they trade the innate survivability of ranged condition users with a riskier melee combat.
With the upcoming changes to condi Warriors (Pin Down nerf) and without any buff to Thief’s P/D specs, I’d say that Dire gear is perfectly fine in WvW. I am using some Dire pieces on my SB/Sw+D Ranger and Engineer engi too, but only after I reached at least 33% Critical Chance. So that would mean that I get around 1500 HP from Dire Gear overall.
Of course, this is assuming CURRENT meta. With the change to Critical Damage, some condition builds will be even stronger in WvW roaming (such as Engineers and Rangers).
I don’t think you have ever actually used the Natures voice build if you think the setup suffers from a lack of survivability.
I have also never had problems hitting people with either bonfire (which is massive when traited) or torch throw so I don’t know where that is coming from.
Condition Damage gear outside Dire is just plain bad, Rabid is useless as it stacks Precision with Condition Damage and Toughness. While the latter two are fine, precision adds nothing noteworthy to a condition build, critical are poor damage without power and crit procs simply don’t add enough to make up for the loss of a stat – which is why most crit sigils are dirt cheap. Carrion is reasonable, but vitality is not the best defensive stat, especially in Wvw and Power may be hard to make a contribution in a condition build. And those are your option for condition damage, Dire, Rabid and Carrion and only one of those has no lost stats.
You are completely wrong actually.
Precision is absolutely mandatory to Engineers and Necromancers, as they need it for the “Burn on Crit” procs, which are the only way of putting condi pressure on your opponent. Rangers too need it in order to have a reliable way of applying conditions, because of the 66% chance of applying Bleed on crit (which is a must for SB rangers).
Mesmers are the same as Rangers, since they need their clones to proc Bleeds on crits.
I don’t think you understand what makes a condition class viable. I’ll try to explain it to you in a quick way:
A condition spec needs 2 things:
1) Access to a condi spike. This will be what makes you kill your opponent. Condi spikes are represented by:
a) burning (Engineer and Necros have it thanks to On crit procs)
b) 5+ stacks of torment in a single attack
c) 6+ stacks of bleed in a single attack
d) Terror (Necro only)
e) 5+ stacks of confusion
Condi spikes are the “trump card” of condition specs. It is what they absolutely need to actually kill an opponent.
2) Easy access to damaging conditions. This is usually represented by having bleed on your auto attack (Thief, Engineer, Necro). Mesmers (thanks to clones) and Rangers (with SB) can still easily apply 2-3 stacks of bleeds thanks to bleed on crit trait.
As I previously stated, the only classes which really does not need Precision are Thieves and Warriors.
Any Engineer, Necro, Mesmer or Ranger in full Dire gear will either lose access to their condi spike (Engineers mostly) or to their “shaving” bleeds (Rangers/Mesmers).
I have fought full Dire Engineers, full dire Mesmers and full Dire Necros, and believe me, they were absolutely easy to take down because they simply did not put enough damaging conditions on me to take me down. You will not kill anyone with bleeds alone, and you will not kill anyone with condi spikes only, unless you are facing a class with close to none condition removal.
Mind me: I am not saying that Dire gear is good for this game – the fact that it is a no-no in the PvP area is enough to say that it is not.
Condition rangers run apoth/dire (obviosly no dire in spvp) with s/d-a/t. You can easily stack bleeds with axe2, dagger5 and geo sigils. You also get fair superior CC than on the SB.
kittened devs will not even hear you i bet … they haven’t even moved their finger for an year and a half … they won’t do it anytime soon.
I actually think they will not even do the update in march (as they told us on stream it would come on jan 21st, & then delayed it to march)
It’s the beginning of the year, chances are they will do to us what they did to us in the beginning of last year when the game first came out. The first big balance patch that came out everyone had something except for ranger’s. Not even one bullet point for ranger’s. I’m betting that this time around they will stick with tradition and not give us a single thing on the next balance patch.
Oh we will get one. Something along the lines of “Sword root fix delayed indefinitely for further testing” and then we will never hear of it again.
To be fair, the game is actually pretty ok-balanced.
I mean, maybe I have inverse rose-coloured goggles, but at the same age WoW felt much less balanced, especially on small-scale class-per-class balance. And DaoC never reached the balance GW2 has now, not even at it’s peak.
Games that have hard class roles are much harder to balance than anet’s “everyone can do everything” approach. It may not be as obvious but the imbalance is still there and becomes highly exaggerated in areas like WvW zerg combat where party buffs and survivability rule over all else and in dungeons where the team is capped at less people than the amount of classes in the game.
It’s the condtion version of Soldiers. If you belive Dire is too tanky, then so is Soldiers. It won’t help though, because you can mix and match gear anyway.
Physical damage requires power, precision and crit damage to do maximum damage. PVT requires sacrificing crit chance and damage for tank. What exactly do you need to sacrifice with dire?
If you are doing well with this then you will do even better with the dire/apoth regen build. If you are going to bring traps with the trait then you really should be running spike. both flame and viper’s are superfluous when you have s/d and a torch since both poison and burning only stack duration and the weapon combo with offhand training allows for long applications against a single target of both conditions.
The regen build also has the added benefit of perma swiftness which helps out on those big BL maps.
