Keep the pet on passive and use as a damage/condition sponge. Or range pets.
Right but I think most of us would like to give ANet more credit than imagining this was the pet’s intended purpose all along. The complete lack of feedback would beg to differ unfortunately.
More like the pet didn’t end up working in what WvW became (everything about the way they have handled WvW and the lag in it suggests they never imagined T1-2 situations) and they really just don’t care enough to think up practical solutions to the problem. We finally got another, much needed, HP buff to pets and it doesn’t even affect them in WvW, the one place they need it the absolute most.
Throw torch really needs to do something more than moderate damage and burning application. Right now it’s basically just Ele scepter #1 when attuned to fire.
I get the whole “Agragorn throwing his torch into the Witch King’s face” deal but it’s just a really boring skill.
I have no clue how anyone can call a Ranger a Monster in the Lagwars wvwvw zones. Good luck getting anything with a cool down to take, much less control a pet or get a pet ability to go off in a big battle or defense of a keep or when one starts up and it lags the entire zone.
If this round of optimization that they’re beginning doesn’t fix the lag issues that plague wvwvw, then I think Anet should do away with the pet, at least make it optional in wvwvw with a corresponding dps increase.
I think it is fair to assume classes aren’t balanced around zerg v zerg.
Classes aren’t balanced at all. ANet very clearly balances their game around sPvP and if your class has any pressence whatsoever there you will receive absolutely no attention from the development staff at all. Who cares if the build that they run in sPvP doesn’t work outside of duels or in the smallest of roaming encounters. Who cares if your class will never have a power option or a reason to use bows… you’ve always got your condi/bunker meta to fall back on.
…I use a power based build in both spvp and wvw and do just fine. Just sayin’.
No you don’t. No Ranger does fine in a zerg fight because pets don’t do fine in a zerg fight.
In fact, they don’t do anything at all except die the second the pain train comes anywhere near them. Even the purest, player traits only, ranger build will still suffer a big dps and utility loss when the pet is dead.
Until they do something about pet survivability in WvW zergs we will always be subpar in the game play that actually drives PPT and wins matches. People can fool themselves into thinking they are doing just as good as the other guys next to them on heavies or lights (all of us adventurer classes are kind of in the same boat, maybe less so for engies) but the numbers say your wrong regardless of your personal perception.
It’s just about breaking down anything long-lasting, see Muddy Terrain. We already had Heal as One for instant heal, and Troll Unguent for 10s of strong regen. So anyone that wanted faster heals had them available (and with no fire field overwriting too!). But no, the slower, longer lasting skill had to be accelerated so it fits better with the rest of the short-lived effects in this game.
Healing spring was already vastly better than heal as one, even before the update.
Heal as one is easily the most lackluster heal in the game.
Longbow just needs it’s mechanic reworked so it does something like adds 2% crit damage at 500+ range and adds 5% at 1000+ range. Its a big enough buff to make sniping at long range feel most powerful but doesn’t penalize you when the enemy inevitably uses a gap closer and cc on you.
As far as the axe goes either the idea about bouncing it off your pet or increasing the damage but making it so it can’t hit the same target twice with a bounce would do it.
Until we get more info on the radius, heal amount, and cooldown I think it’s a bit early to start putting more nails in the Ranger coffin.
This will obviously be better in the new content areas where we will likely see Toxin spammed mercilessly, but probably won’t be versatile enough in other areas to outshine existing heals.
Healing spring also gives regen and nothing implies that the healing will be an aoe like the condition purge.
I for one do not like it. This is just the first of what will surely be many more universal skills to come. If we start adding universal skills, then what is the point of having professions?
Yeah, universal skills are a bad way to go. This isn’t the “new skills” people were asking for…
I imagine it’s only going to be for this dungeon, like toxin will just be the new “agony” or w/e.
No, I suspect people just wanted skills to make their own, preferred class stronger.
Which is why we’ll never get it lol! Seriously, 900 range traps would be insane! Total insanity imho.
He isn’t wrong in that we need more ranged aoe and it couldn’t be any worse than mark necros operating at 1200 range.
Yep, sry but you think traps are strong, you havent tried necro (my main for last year). Wells and marks do waaay more damage with stronger effects, at longer range. Necro has a trap ranger beat in that department by a long shot. Ranger is more mobile and has better single target dps, with decent aoe.
Which is the reason you see tons of marks/wells Necros in wvw zergs and virtually no trap Rangers. Or if they are there they’re dead seconds after throwing their traps because the zerg ran them over while they used up all their utilities at 600 range.
… and of course this has nothing to do with the current necro meta but rather with their wells. Sure.
Spectral wall and blinding plague form are also insanely powerful in a zerg fight, but, yes, it has a lot to do with the fact that Marks hit hard, have powerful effects and can be laid down in chokes. Anyone who actually plays WvW enough to try to comment would know this.
I haven’t brought my Ranger into LagWars2 yet, I can’t even imagine what it must be like to try to control your pets attack right now, when I can’t even control my Warriors attacks (aside from auto). It was bad before the world blobs showed up on the scene.
My sympathies.
You stack up traits that only affect yourself, forget the pet even exists, and act like a thief with no stealth and more tank than spank.
Every other heavy runs around in abyss stained armor with some unholy looking weapon on their back already. Would taking the guardian, inverting it’s skill color scheme and making it’s abilities more offensive than defensive be that game breaking?
People should be more worried about such a class overlapping with stuff we already have such as guardians, warriors and necros than flipping kitten because of that one really successful MMO that shall not be named has something similar in it.
What I mean by all this is… this is the first world problems of first world problems.
It’s like the 1%ers of problems. If you’re honestly raging about competitive balance in COSTUME BRAWLS… how the hell do you play this game long enough to even get into costume brawls in the in first place?
The same could be said for people who complain about spvp. Many don’t play that mode and it doesn’t matter to them if it’s imbalanced as hell yet we are all expected to care when something becomes OP flavor of the month.
I really wish they would scrap the Town Clothes bit and turn it into a Ward Robe area that way you could look like what you want to look like in the wardrobe slots but still have your armor slots have the stats
could still make it work with Transmutation Stones
I can tell you Played Rift
it has that.
Both Terra and GW1 have the same system. It works because people are happy with the ability to actually use clothes in regular game play and people are more likely to buy them because they are happy.
(Note both systems use cotume slots to place the items in and didn’t require you to skin items, locking you to one set of armor, on one character)
I’d suspect they would not only sell far more clothes items with the system that they themselves used a game before, but would have more freedom to create items that didn’t need to be a whole set or could create things like the outfits that are one piece and frees them from clipping problems when mixed with other armor.
As it is, it seems like the only people who actually buy town clothes do it for the brawl items or as a way to show they have money to burn on something that can’t even be used in combat.
I have also noticed that the dialogue and music levels will greatly vary from local to local. When I’m in the character selection screen the bgm is clearly audible like it was before the patch but then will drop significantly compared to combat and menu sfx the second I load into a map.
The problem can be largely solved by cranking the master volume and bgm very high and lowering effects and menu sliders very low but this wasn’t necessary before the latest patch that addressed sound issues.
Which is why we’ll never get it lol! Seriously, 900 range traps would be insane! Total insanity imho.
He isn’t wrong in that we need more ranged aoe and it couldn’t be any worse than mark necros operating at 1200 range.
Yep, sry but you think traps are strong, you havent tried necro (my main for last year). Wells and marks do waaay more damage with stronger effects, at longer range. Necro has a trap ranger beat in that department by a long shot. Ranger is more mobile and has better single target dps, with decent aoe.
Which is the reason you see tons of marks/wells Necros in wvw zergs and virtually no trap Rangers. Or if they are there they’re dead seconds after throwing their traps because the zerg ran them over while they used up all their utilities at 600 range.
I think that when it’s traited you will also pull conditions off people in range that will then just disappear but it doesn’t factor yourself into those (likely max of 5) people much the same way the signet won’t purge conditions on your pet when you use it.
I don’t know wtf you guys play. I don’t have problems with staying in melee train with GS and in ptv gear. I don’t argue warr or guard are more useful there, but there is sth wrong with you if you “melt” there.
You’ve pretty much highlighted the point of the thread… you can play like a Warrior, but you’ll never be remotely close to a warrior. Not in damage. Not in utility.
^ This
Traits like Dogged March alone make the warrior superior in a zerg fight without even addressing the fact that they do superior damage.
We aren’t useless in a fight but you need to play more defensively with a stat spread more focused on offense or you just won’t do enough damage long enough to make your presence mean anything.
A big part of the problem is our pets having no survivability in a zerg fight and only one species even cleaves on it’s melee. Add in the fact that we have limited aoe options (traps are decent but have short ranged application and take up vital utility slots). We are a mid/back line, mop up class in the zerg and probably always will be without some serious fixes to class mechanics.
If you want to play like guardian/warrior just make one and use it because a ranger will never be able to fill their shoes.
I get the feeling Anet wants lb and gs to be power weapons, they just have no idea how to make them viable. They thinking nerfing our other weapons will make them stronger, hilarious.
Dat shortbow though. It’s so good.
I disagree, we just think it is good because it is our only weapon with the entire package (hard cc, soft cc, evade, condition application) and because it is mindbogglingly easy to use. If we had some weapons that were actually worth using other than in niche builds, I think we would all see how bland and normal the shortbow really is. As it stands now, it is our most basic option that works, so it appears strong.
What’s depressing is if LB was given an aimed shot skill it would probably be a complete and viable weapon.
What makes longbow not viable? I mean, on the forums today I am reading that rangers want A) aoe like necro kill shot C) stability from a shout (lol that was my idea) D) increased range on both bows…
So when these features are implemented, I wager ANET changes the profession name to “Godmode”.
lol the people who already have killshot don’t even use it.
What gives me trouble? A good p/d thief will make me struggle.
Im sorry Its Anets fault, but lets be honest p/d is almost obsolete at this point, everyone and their brother is easymoding d/p and plex runes. I refuse to change to that crap!
Ya, a real man hides in stealth and has degen do his killing for him, right?
Lmao, what does a condition build have to do with being a man.
Poor choice of words maybe. It was sarcasm meant to illustrate that it’s silly to try to claim others are easy moding with the D/P thieves on a build that relies on stealth to hide the person while they bleed the opponent to death. Implying one stealth crutch build is less “easy mode” than another is ridiculous.
What gives me trouble? A good p/d thief will make me struggle.
Im sorry Its Anets fault, but lets be honest p/d is almost obsolete at this point, everyone and their brother is easymoding d/p and plex runes. I refuse to change to that crap!
Ya, a real man hides in stealth and has degen do his killing for him, right?
Consider it a balance against the perma regen/swiftness that people use it for almost exclusively.
Probably the reason for it, which is ridiculous in my opinion. Devs make an entire skill category insta cast for Guardians in the last patch, but we still have the sole shout in the game with casting time because they chose to add boons to our shouts? And thats IF you take 30 points to get that grandmaster trait, so in the other words they are balancing that skill based on one single grandmaster trait?
Does that sound right to you?
Nothing Anet does with class balance seems right to me.
I’m curious just where exactly this health buff on pets was implemented and why? because I just did a dungeon and I am absolutely positive my pet did not have more health in there wich makes me wonder was this buff now only implemented in non instanced pve maps aka not in spvp, dungeons or wvw if this is the case it would be fantasticly fun to know the reasoning because it means it was implemented in the only enviroment it wasn’t needed and excluded in the 3 where it would have been anythign from welcome to desperatly needed.
Even with the health boost, pets are still going to die relatively quickly against lieutenant and above enemies. Basically, just remember how long they lasted before the buff and then increase that duration a little less than double.
They last much longer against multiple white enemies and can avoid getting one shotted by champs/legendaries, but they are still incredibly fragile with no dodge ability.
They seriously need to fix this, the only way for it to be viable is to stack it with multiple conditions. What they should do is to make it work so that the vines will continue to root you; unless you escape the area where the Entangle was casted. You can make it a max of 5 targets at a time, but a continuous 15 second pulse of rooting or something like that every 3 seconds. If this seems overpowering compared to the current use, then make it a grand master trait then in Nature Magic.
Dropping this off in the suggestion forum, the rest is up to the devs.
doesn’t the tooltip say that, in order to escape, the vines must be destroyed? if anyone is able to escape without destroying the vines, that is a seriously game-breaking bug.
The vines are an independent mob that applies 1.5 seconds of immobilize every second. It’s the immobilize, not the vines themselves, that keep you in place. all you have to do is avoid getting hit by the vines and you avoid the immob application.
The easiest way to do this is to time a dodge roll right or simply use a long duration evade. Stealth also effectively negates the skill since the vines need to be able to target the person to do their job. Getting launched, pulled or knocked back will also move the person out of the vines and end it’s effect.
The skill works as intended, it’s just a really badly designed skill.
If they make events too complicated, say if Tequila Sunrise would walk around the map and you had to avoid getting stepped on, bitten, or hit with it’s tail people would flood the forums complaining that they couldn’t “press __ to not die” fast enough because the server was on it’s knees crying from all the activity in one place.
It’s rather boring content but there’s not much they can do to make it better with the hardware they have.
I have been having the same problem since the last patch that supposedly fixed sound bugs.
Everything sounds fine except my bgm is so quiet I can barely hear it. Only by cranking my speakers to max and turning every other sound option to nearly off can I hear it at normal, audible levels now.
I have actually seen a lot of 1:2 ratio wipes in favor of the smaller zerg but it almost always only works because the smaller zerg is overwhelmingly heavy based or the larger zerg is an unorganized pug blob that routs after about a 1/3 of their forces get downed
Funny, my guild never creates a mindless blob, we are too organized to create what you call a mindless blob, hence why we have taken on a hundred at a time as a group of 35 or a little higher than that. We offer each other builds for survivability and certainly do not rely on full burst, nor full condition damage , but a hybrid of everything. When we die, it’s because we messed up in tactic or got flanked for creating too much of a tail; moreover, when rangers in my guild die from a zerg, it’s primarily due to our bad positioning(like straying away from the periphery without noticing, or not grouping up, etc). Since what you see happening to your rangers is obviously not working out, well, then maybe you should work with them instead of cracking jokes and making them feel worse about the class; theoretically, a guild is supposed to be like a family overall. If you only see bad rangers, well then don’t use that sample size to draw the conclusion for all rangers in the game; the reason I say this is because ranger is a difficult class to build so that it suits every one of your needs. Of course for the context of this post, I probably mentioned earlier that WvW is not intended for a 1v1 clash; WvW is Server Vs Server, if you want to roam alone in WvW, there would be absolutely no point in doing so because your roaming really isn’t helping your server win the battles. As far as mobility goes, there are survivability utility skills, warhorn buffs, and static fields and warhorn buffs that should come from warriors and elementalists to keep up with speed. Overall there is not much you should be complaining about other than your expertise as a commander orguild leader.
The max players per server is about 70 so, ya, you aren’t wiping 100 with 35.
And if you are trying to claim you wipe 1.5 servers with half a server then all I can say is I’ll believe it when I see it.
Look at our Axe MH. Mostly used for conditions, yet weak Power AA. No real idea.
^ I think this nails the reason why we should not have condition skills on GS and LB.
GS used to put out bleeds on Maul. It was totally useless because it was a small number of bleeds with no other good source of conditions. It also detracted from GS as a power weapon because the damage on Maul was compromised by having some of its damage as bleeds.
Not sure about now but people crunched the numbers and found the old vulnerability on maul was a dps nerf vs the bleeds.
Don’t know if it’s intended, but the Fern Hound does not heal itself. Can it at least heal itself as well? I know the brown bear removes any debuffs to itself with its F2 ability.
Thanks.
Were you using it in PvE? The new pet HP means they still receive the old values but the change will bu much more subtle on their HP bar.
I was noticing this in the labrynth last night. Trolls works as intended but now their bar is only going to refill about as half as fast because it’s that much larger now.
I know about sword #2 and how to use it, but in my experience without swiftness it covers roughly the same distance as a person running with swiftness. I did use greatsword when it had bleed on maul. It was nice, I could use axe/torch on my other set, both with geomancy runes. I was able to scrap all trap traits, because throwing traps wasn’t a problem anymore. I could close distance with GS #3 and drop traps below my opponent. It certainly caught many people off guard. Nice times….
That is my experience with the sword leap trick. It just requires too much stopping and there is that aftercast pause at the end of the leap back that just barely puts you ahead of a person just running in a straight line. All they have to do is dodge forward if you are trying to catch someone with the combo and you’ll never touch them.
This is pretty much what I have been running for the past two weeks in zergs. It’s probably not the best dueling setup but I find it offers a great level of flexibility when going from zerg mindliner to running supply or killing a yak on the other end of borderlands.
When running the three sig setup I usually swap out knowledge for healer’s celerity. The bonus is pretty weak but faster rez’s are faster rez’s I guess.
I usually run spring for the obvious team utility in zergs but switch to renewal sig and trolls when out solo. Oh and when not in battle swap out one of your offhands for a warhorn for blasts and teams swiftness otherwise you’s a bad ranger…
Lick Wounds has been failing me. Pet will run to my dying body, stand over me, and watch A few months back, there was a bug where lick wounds and search and rescue would fail on uneven ground. This was fixed, but perhaps it was un-fixed in another patch?
It’s still just as glitchy as ever. It works slightly better than it did at launch but the only way to guarantee it will work right is to get downed on a completely level surface.
:( I was one of the many Thieves who fell victim to it tonight. It reeks of shoddy game design and it’s just so ridiculous that I can still hardly believe that Anet actually listened to the QQing and created an unavoidable stealth counter rather than just encouraging players to learn the already existing counters.
I can still hardly believe Anet created a degenerate, unremovable stealth mechanic on a class with no attack cooldowns rather than just encouraging players to learn how to play the game.
But if I had some doubts regarding competences of the balancing team back in July, now I just feel that they leave me no choice but to actually consider them fully incompetent.
Back in July??
You must be a new ranger player because the the so-called ‘balance’ team’s effort on this class stopped last November. This was the reason I leveled a guardian back in January.
Oh, quite on the contrary. I’ve been maining a ranger since launch. What is more, for various reasons I barely play anything else than my main. But I also have enough experience with MMOs in general to be able to tell that even if some decisions made around July were plainly stupid, quality of balancing, and what comes with it, size of the balancing errors, wasn’t exactly that much different from what’ve already seen in other games. Consequently, I couldn’t really say that responsible devs are less competent than their counterparts from other companies. Which says quite a lot about the state of the genre, sadly…
I wouldn’t say this is true at all. even the dev team that handled GW1’s balance, while not always on point and neglecting many major issues, would tack on explanations to their updates and what they hoped to achieve by changing said skills. It was a far cry from the vacuum of communication we get punctuated by inhuman prepared statements.
And don’t even get me started on EvE Online that not only would post updates a week in advance on the forums, but you would get devs communicate with players in the threads like human beings and discussing any issues that people could see since they have the intelligence to identify that crowd sourcing a group of people who play your game a lot more than you do is a good way to augment your own abilities.
Both CCP and 200x era Anet also cared enough about their player base to QA updates so they don’t get crap loads of broken tool tips or skills not even working at all.
Doing a wrong thing balance-wise and providing an explanation for it doesn’t make you less incompetent. It makes your communication with the community better, but that’s about it. And the quality of communication done by Anet is by far the worst I’ve ever seen, that’s something I don’t have any doubts about. And I don’t see point in discussing it anymore, as all it will lead is another deleted thread.
At the same time though, there are cases like SWTOR (a game I actually enjoyed greatly and still come back to from time to time). Notes were always posted weeks before the patches. There was a full-scale PTS running. People were voicing their concerns regarding the proposed changes. And devs usually followed with their decisions regardless of any complaints. You think Warrior / Guardian meta is broken, you should’ve seen what happened to SWTOR’s PvP when Focus JK / Rage SW became top of the food chain.
I’m starting to think that the biggest problem with balancing at this point is the fact that devs are ACTUALLY TRYING to stay true to their “not doing whack-a-mole balancing changes” declaration. To do that, balancing is done mostly with small and rather insignificant changes. But there are glaring issues present that require much more than small changes, possibly really large-scale buffs, that bear some risk of being too strong.
One of the of whack-a-mole approach is that FOTMs emerge. Theoretically, Anet’s approach limits the possibility and frequency with which this happens. The irony is that instead of having Flavors of the Month we have Flavor of the Year. FOTMs are not a good thing, by any standards, but because they are to some extend temporary, players can expect balancing to shift again within a couple of months, and, unless they’re the FOTM chasers themselves, keep playing the classes they chose. With FOTY and current approach to balance we can hardly expect anything like that to happen in GW2 at this point.
I didn’t mean that the others were less incompetent. I haven’t played EvE in a long time but I’m willing to bet that missiles/railguns , and subsequently the entire Caldari ship line, are still borderline useless in pvp and I have a list as long as my arm of silly BS the GW1 guys pulled.
My point was that they at least provided explanations that let us the players try to figure out why they made their decisions. Maybe they weren’t always the best decisions, but it at least felt like they cared enough to justify them and let us know whether they were even listening.
Hell, I’d love to know why they thought our pets didn’t deserve an hp boost in WvW when anyone who has ever fought in a zerg fight knows for a fact that pets don’t even last long enough to be of any use.
I use off-hand training, the problem with dagger #5 isn’kittens range, its that it hardly even hits standing targets. Its like shooting the old longbow and getting obstructed/miss.
I’m pretty sure we are actually throwing a very poorly made paper airplane.
It reminds me of the old projectile on the Necro staff that was only slightly faster than a person runs.
kill shot C) stability from a shout (lol that was my idea) D) increased range on both bows…
Its Anets fault, but lets be honest p/d is almost obsolete at this point, everyone and their brother is easymoding d/p and plex runes. I refuse to change to that crap!