Yeah, the art and animations are consistently amazing. At least we got back items fixed, right? Right? Because everyone is using mainhand axe, right???? Haha
Seriously though, you’re right. For all the complaining about bloodlust, gvg, how fun or lame point capture mode is, has there been a single criticism about the new terrain on the borderlands? It’s darn near perfect to me.
It can compound lag in big field fights if they are near the East and South portions pretty bad and it can slow down zerg movement that used to just be a beeline through the lake though that can be a good or bad thing based on which side of that zerg you’re on lol.
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.
Never expected it to reveal something you didnt have targeted, this was never implied.
They never stated that it needed to target someone to work and their wording of “sniff out” to describe it implies finding something already hidden aka stealthed.
Ironically the only class that doesn’t have reliable condition strip options is the Ranger itself.
In a week everyone will be used to the idea that immob stacks and will just purge it after they see you start your combo.
Its not that great for 1v1 fights, Thieves will still get away just as easily, and it won’t really be of use.
However if you’re zerging around on Ranger, Please for the love of god, Use this ability..
I caused the death of quite a few thieves I just happen to run across that went for the stealth at half life..
It doesn’t make us more more valuable, just more kittenish, and to be honest, there needs to be a kittenish class in this game to annoy thieves.
If they had left it at 3000 range it might have been of some use in tagging one guy to show where a just veiled zerg was moving to but by 2000 units they are already veiled and will be on top of you a second later.
I believe it immobilizes when you use trap potency but trappers defense does not ever immobilize for some reason according to the tooltip. Or is the tooltip incorrect? This is one I meant to point out earlier but forgot, thanks for reminding me.
Trapper’s Expertise adds the immobilize effect to Spike Trap.
What about the skirmishing adept trait Trappers Defense?
No idea, I’ve never used it personally. I suppose it might if it generates the same effect as the skill.
I believe it immobilizes when you use trap potency but trappers defense does not ever immobilize for some reason according to the tooltip. Or is the tooltip incorrect? This is one I meant to point out earlier but forgot, thanks for reminding me.
Trapper’s Expertise adds the immobilize effect to Spike Trap.
good !
pet viability in PVE up !
pet viability in PVP stayed the same GOOD !
keep it up arena.net
great change I was afraid the increase would translate to WvW since PVE and WvW mostly use the same skills and stats, glad you made the split there
For those of us not playing in tier 6-7 server bush leagues, not buffing the pet’s HP in WvW is a bad thing. The pet might as well be one of those 0 armor critters you crit for elentybillion damage when you try to bring it into a SMC 3way with 150-200 people all right on top of one another.
I like the patch. Sure it wasn’t all we want, but it’s a step in the right direction. I think we should applaud anet for going in the right direction and ask them to keep buffing rangers.
Applauding anet is like applauding a chef for not sneezing on your steak even though he didn’t bother to cook it before serving it to you.
I love how you Rangers are not asking for unreasonable buffs (which other classes somehow get now and then) but simply asking the devs to look into fixing the bugs, stealth nerfs and incorrect skill descriptions that is tormenting this class. Hope all the best for Rangers to be treated fairly.
Won’t happen but it’s nice to see that other classes get where we’re coming from lol.
I saw a lot of bla this bla that. Have you actually tested the new ranger patched yet? If not I suggest you to test it.
Healing spring: Instead of 15s, your field last for 10. It still has 5 ticks. Previously you regen 2340 for 6 ticks (first ticks from the moment you put down your spring). Each ticks heal you for 390 for duration of 3 sec. Now you heal for 2 sec. How is this bad? Also 10s is more than enough to spam your blast finisher. 5s don’t really make much difference.
Jungle Stalker: I am not big fan of pet since it’s just a luggage. But heck if while it still alive it can give your party for 5 might for 15 sec. Heck why not?
Also to be fair, I think Anet should consider to patch the broken pet. It’s AI is still very terrible. Ranger sword still locked the class due the attack animation is lower than the shown tooltip (0.5 sec). The best way to move out is after the last chain but it’s ridiculous to only be able to move out at only the last chain.
I still have not tested the rest of ranger patch yet since the rest don’t really interest me but I may give it a shot to see why you all whine so much about it.
5 seconds is a huge deal in WvW where blasting water finishers actually matters and where ranger’s are so lackluster that people would rather you take absolutely any other class instead of one. Having a huge water field that 2 ranger’s could keep up indefinitely was about the only amazing thing we had going for us and that just got nerfed for pretty much no reason what so ever.
Months ago? They nerfed the kitten out of it’s range and made 3,4,5 all match the damage of the auto attack skill so it would fool people into thinking it wasn’t a blatant nerf to something that didn’t need it.
Hide in plain site is also being applied to me when I use pet #2 skills. With fern hound and brown bear at least…the #2 skill makes hide in plain site proc and I turn invisible.
One of the greatest buffs we receive with the patch is a bug.
If the class is so crappy (it’ not), why do I see so many rangers in PvE?
Because the vast majority of players don’t play enough to notice balance problems (i.e. most players are fairly casual). Many average players will roll a ranger because ranger is a classic fantasy archtype and many people identify with that archtype.
^ This
The ranger class is so easy to use in overworld PvE that virtually every bot this game ever had was just an automated ranger on a scripted path.
Warriors may kill things quicker, but Rangers can do it with the least amount of effort or risk.
That kind of thing is very attractive to pve casuals who probably have 0 interest in anything pvp related.
In Gw1 that was like our #1 role in some maps. We had TWO OR THREE elites dedicated to just that….
Well, to be fair, back then conditions/hexes meant something and you had to rely on team coordination to handle them, not just face roll your keyboard if you play some certain classes.
The Ranger in team combat is a shadow of what the cripshot/Melandru’s(when it was borderline OP) Ranger brought to GvG.
And here’s another question: Was there even a Pet health boost in PvE?!
The tooltip for My Jaguars health is identical to pre-patch?
I’m not seeing the 71% ?
I’m willing to bet there hasn’t been a single change to pet health at all unless they boosted the baseline stats. My wolf still has 2061 Vit, no more, no less…
More empty promises.
I would assume it would be a buff to their baseline health, not to the vit attribute as that’s an easier across the board fix since other minions don’t have stats.
Unless they come out and say so the only way to know is just to let an npc attack your pet and count the damage tics it takes to kill it and compare kitten the prepatch value.
speak for yourself please. …unless “we” means your AI pet which I have a lot of trouble believing its capable of such awareness when it can’t even climb up a 1 foot box to lick wounds when you get downed anywhere but flat ground.
Getting teabagged by my pet while I bleed to death on a 15 degree incline was only funny the first time it happened.
Nothing but single digit reductions on cooldowns and tooltip/bug fixes.
meanwhile, Warriors and Guardian are better than ever and only ever seem to get stronger with each passing update.
Also, just in case anyone was still delusional enough to think anet values the classes equally, while we are still asking for a simple fix to 1H sword…
“Final Thrust: This ability now uses a more fluid animation.”
No it’s definitely going to be apathy city around here in 10 hours…. like the poor kid on christmas watching all the great toys every other kid in town got
I’m the only one to have noticed they said bufff of 71% of HP in PVE and nothing for wvwvw or Pvp ?
Because in zerg and such pets/spirits still gonna die fast…
BTW i’m interested in stack duration of immobilize, because muddy terrain+stone spirit quicksand + entangle…can make a lot of sec of immobilize…
Need to see the patchnotes btw..
As far as I know, WvW and PvE are considered the same game mode aside from the obvious package ban in WvW. It remains to be seen how this will help any in a big zerg. I’m not very optimistic that much will change since I can drop in 2 seconds with 20k health and 3000 armor if I wade into an aoe clusterkitten by mistake and pets do that habitually.
You have a wildly inflated sense some self worth if you can assume that anyone here would know how many hours you’ve logged (as though that means anything) or that you have a champ hunter title.
Yeah I was on the fence about replying to him to be honest, but I guess I was offended that people would spout nonsense that others don’t know the profession from absolutely no idea of who that person may be.
And you’re right in saying those things don’t mean anything. But I will not be quiet while people talk trash about me when I know they are wrong. I guess I am a narcissist, oh well. Life ain’t perfect.
Understandable, I just get irked when people use game play time as a measure of experience when I myself have clocked more hours than I care to think about just standing around akitten LA/mists and messing around on my phone waiting for (pretty sure bugged) wvw queues to pop lol.
*that kitten is the acronym for away from keyboard, why is this censored on an mmo forum? Come on anet…
“Thieves may be hit hard this patch.. when they moused over thief remove condition every 3 seconds while in stealth trait it said every 10 seconds… that is a hell of a nerf and thieves will die to condition builds easily.”
If that is true then there will probably be no thieves left to play against.
lol I am going to be so glad I held onto my rabid/rampager gear if this is true.
Clockheart – No amount of tanking gear is going to save you from his kill shot. Also condition damage is bad when pulling as if you are a class that procs a burn (necro, engi) then the hologram generally dies before it gets anywhere near clockheart. Once again, dodge roll appropriately and DPS him down after exploding a hologram. Zerker gear once again wins out right.
Actually…I’ve survived his kill shot thing. Never went into down state despite taking all of the hits. Sure my HP was around 1000…but you get the point.
I do feel they need to fix this problem with DPS the best way I can think of…make enemies take crap damage from DPS but full damage from conditions, with the HP adjusted so conditions are the only real way you’re going to take down the creatures. Make half of the enemies DPS take-downs, and half condition take-downs. And then make it so the bosses switch ‘weakness’ constantly throughout the battles. There, you’ve made conditions worthwhile.
A good idea in theory, but what about LFG? Assuming he had that change, now it has to make sure there’s a mix of condition and damage players in a pick up group (LFG is now designed into the game so they are trying to provide a level platform for everyone to play in).
Also, there’s the issue of people that only have berserker armor and now have to farm new armor. I’m sure they don’t want to hear those complaints either.
If they do nothing but pve then they will have enough badges of honor to buy 2 sets of armor just from the achievement chests.
An easy fix would be to have an even spread of +vitality/-armor and +armor/-vitality enemies and mix them up in the dungeons and make the bosses less scripted. Just adding a randomly selected, exact clone with inverted defensive stats would go a long
way towards promoting a more spread out team composition instead of the “hit it with your great sword as fast as you can” meta we have now.
It wouldn’t be perfect but anet is all about easy fixes and this is about the simplest band-aid fix I can think of.
seriously I dont know why you force yourself giving idea, I mean, is useless Anet dont care 90% of the time, Anet hate ranger, deal with it.
Sometimes they listen. I highly doubt we would have ever gotten a blast finisher on the warhorn #5 if we hadn’t made such a stink over how we had no on demand blast finisher.
I hope I didn’t sound too critical.
I do want to say that I think you nicely covered the general stepping stones he should know about. Which is more than I can say about most people doling out meta flavored advice on forums.
Really, the thing I’ve got beef with is less what the Ranger himself is wearing, and more that I tend to think having to mind a cat/bird pet and a spirit in addition to yourself is what pushes the effective skill level of that build into ‘maybe not okay for a newbie’ territory.
Cats and Birds are pretty high maintenance with their low defenses and (in the case of Birds) low F2 cooldowns. I think SoS is a big help, but it’s no substitute for attentiveness. Add a Spirit on top of that, whose best chance for survival is specific placement. Well, there’s nothing that can really replace having enough foreknowledge of the fight to know where the safe spots are.
In the very least I’d suggest selecting less high maintenance pets that do something to mind themselves*, if not forgoing the Spirit entirely until OP has a handle of what to expect. Ideally, the updates tomorrow will bring down the maintenance level of all pets, so the former is probably the most effective place to start.
/* (ex: Drakes who have decent toughness, heal themselves and have a blast finisher for ranger’s healing skill water field. Or, Devourers who attack from a range, and dig into the ground and retreat if an enemy gets too close.)
Ive found birds to be able to take quite a bit of damage before they go down and their slow rate of attack seems to make it easier to call them back without getting buggy action queue problems that can sometimes happen.
this is a total lie and shows you don’t play this class … …even the part about evades (which have animations twice as long as their actual Evasion tick)
A wild PvE scrub appears!
Yeah I just got this game yesterday. I guess my 4381 hours on the ranger class and my Champion Hunter title means really nothing about my knowledge of the class.
It must be hard getting carried, thinking thieves are the bane of our existence. Thieves need buffs if anything.
You have a wildly inflated sense some self worth if you can assume that anyone here would know how many hours you’ve logged (as though that means anything) or that you have a champ hunter title.
You guys are missing the point. Those 4 seconds can easily be the difference between someone living and dying, or enough time for an interrupt of ours to come up to screw them further. This is a good change, and I expect a well-played ranger will be hell for any profession that relies on stealth.
The most dangerous thieves don’t use d/d or rely heavily on stealth. Anyone with decent physical damage output and enough toughness to survive the initial strike or two from the gank thief can turn the tides with ease. You won’t catch them but they won’t kitten with you once they know you know they’re there and wont fold to their instagib.
Nothing on fixing the mainhand axe animation or the root from the sword one…
If you are referring to the fact that it causes our back item to blink on and off they said they are going to fix back items disappearing when our handheld weapons are supposed to look like they left our hands aka when you “throw” your axe.
Really? I missed that part. I’m concerned about the offhand weapon disappearing too. I’m days from completing rodgort.
I’m sure that is part of it as well though they specifically mentioned back items. I can’t rightly remember where I had read this though to be honest but I do recall something written along these lines.
I still didn’t watch the video, anyone can tell if the reveal will be applied on cast or on pet hit in the target?
It’s applied on cast.
What this means, is if the target is already stealthed, you waited too long.
You have to use sic’em before they stealth like it’s a debuff … a pointless … 4 second … debuff
The skill isn’t useless. It was pretty good for people running BM and now is even better, even if the change is underwhelming.
The skill itself isn’t but what they said they wanted to accomplish with the change is. People who used it before will keep taking it as long as the cooldown remains the same and people who didn’t use it will be hard pressed to sub out another skill for it. Nothing’s really changed.
They have not talk about entangle and stealth glitch
That’s not a glitch. Entangle works by summoning vines that function as independent mobs that apply rapid packets of short duration bleed and immobilize. If you are untargetable or immune to attacks when it ques up it’s application you can walk right out of it. Next time you are in an entangle try dodgerolling or using serpent’s or stalkers strike. You’ll just spin right out of it. Same for anyone who gets launched or knocked back while in an Entangle.
It’s really kittenty design but it’s working as intended.
Too many people crying about how pistol is a bad main hand so anet decided to buff it so that the thief can force you to just stand there while they pellet you to death because the class wasn’t easy enough as is.
I’d say maybe we aren’t shouting loud enough to get our weapon issues looked at but I don’t think that’s even possible.
1H sword would be 15 stacks of vulnerability on non boss mobs.
+ another 5 from pet along with pet might stacks and cripple. While I would love to turn into a salad shooter and just annihilate people, this would be a bit much.
PvE side: Pet health increase: it’s needed, although it needs to be a big one in order to be viable.
PvP side: Sic ’em change is sad. It would be better if nothing changed. A 4 second reveal will not be enough for anything other than zerging a thief with 5 people. And even in that situation, there should be at least three people with ranged dps…
It seems that Anet’s idea about countering perma stealth, is giving ONE class a 4 second reveal… just lol…
It’ll be a cold day in Hell when anet decides that being able to spam 3-4 leap finishers in quick succession is really over powered.
4 is one second more than the 3 they already get from attacking in stealth. This won’t be game breaking against any good thieves and mesmers blink around too much for the damage boost on the pet to even matter.
Unless they change the cooldown it’ll just be used by people who were already using sick’em and the rest of us will just keep using stone sig with high armor and playing on our toes.
A better condition removal for when the thieves hit you with immob for their burst would have gone a much longer way than this.
Nothing on fixing the mainhand axe animation or the root from the sword one…
If you are referring to the fact that it causes our back item to blink on and off they said they are going to fix back items disappearing when our handheld weapons are supposed to look like they left our hands aka when you “throw” your axe.
I like that we aren’t wasting a second of protection when we dodge roll and are already immune to attacks. It should give 2 seconds of invulnerable to the pet, 2 secs of protection isn’t going to do kitten in a wvw zerg or against champ/legendary attacks.
But, ya, typical anet. Move along folks, literally nothing to see here…
Unless they split spvp and pve the change would be too much I think for spvp (don’t know personally but it sounds like spirit rangers are hot kitten in spvp right now)
I’d rather they just have always on stat buffs and unbound gets moved to adept level. +100 toughness and power are a huge buff for a group all on their own.
Traps can be pretty useful in a zerg fight, you just have to careful how you play it since you will have be very close to anyone when you throw your traps at them.
I can’t say from experience how well it works for roaming, but when I run into rangers that throw down 2-3 traps I know what they are doing and just hit them from range, far from the effect of the traps and I suspect others will do the same unless you are fighting over a camp’s circle or a bloodlust node both of which follow spvp combat tactics.
Regarding Remorseless, now that it can be triggered by going into stealth, it would be nice to have the option to gain stealth by other means than the longbow (and the passive trait).
One thing could be to allow the jaguars F2 to affect the ranger also, as that would go well with the intentions to improve the support aspect of our pets as well. Just an idea.
I wish they’d just expand remorseless so that it would trigger on cripple, daze, stun, and knockback as well. Then most weapons and pets would benefit from it in some way. Sword and longbow might benefit too much though.
Cripple’s too much (Holy overpowered 1H sword Batman!) but the GS and LB both need dps increases that would be easily found in a grandmaster trait that gave 2 ‘next hit’s a crit’ chances.
If you want to play a ranger only because you want to play an archer type class, I’d suggest just
^quitting the game or changing your desired playstyle.
There is no archer class in GW2. They’re so incredibly bad they’re not even worth considering. Anything with a bow is strictly not viable, unless you’re 1v1’ing champions in PvE, which is super easy and gets really boring after like the first ten.
I main archers in every game I’ve ever played, including D&D (I play a scout there as to avoid the pet because the kit is not designed so much for ranged combat). I’m deeply disappointed in GW2’s lack of consideration for ranged classes/builds.
It’s pretty obvious that they favor their ninjas and knights above all and wouldn’t dream of making it so that a lowly archer could ever stand up to the titans of melee. Hence, we get game overflowing with spamable gap closers and weak, lackluster ranged combat.
Because Anet for all their talk about being different decided to follow the well-worn path of the fantasy archer trope. They always have to have some beast companion, well that’s great and all all but it’s always a pain in videogames.
It wasn’t until WoW that the “woodsman/archer with his/her trusty <insert animal> companion” trope came into popularity. So I guess it’s Blizzard’s fault.
The idea of a Ranger with an animal companion goes back to DnD and they are just about as marginally useful there as well. They have the same problem we have in that it’s supposed to be a class that can kind of do a little bit of everything but ends up not really offering anything substantial.
Blizzard at least seemed like they tried to make the archer/pet system work where as anet just taped the pieces of failed classes together and called it a day.
Which is doubly rediculous since they got the class exactly right in the first game. I will never understand why they felt it was necessary to retool the whole class into 2-3 separate classes that failed in design when every other core class got an almost direct port (monks excluded for obvious reasons). Hell, even assassins came back in all their facerolly glory.
but is a ranger good in wvw 1v1 etc? i love shortbows and sword+dagger concept
Condition bunker is very good 1v1 but is borderline useless in zerg fights and probably too survivability focused to help much in team fights.
Sword/dagger + short bow is a very effective combo in wvw small scale combat, (don’t use the sword in a zerg) but require a lot of skill to use effectively and are fairly reliant on both physical and condition damage so you can’t just build for one or the other exclusively.
