When have you ever seen a pink quaggan? It’s a backpack shaped like a normal one and you can gamble for a backpack shaped like a horribly disfigured, mutant quaggan with a love of tiny bows.
I’ve read in a couple threads where people are excusing the content based on it being experimental or ‘testing’. Listen, if you are putting something into production where all users will experience it you believe it’s viable. This is where Anet’s disconnect from the genre shows itself clearly. The MMO is not about crushing challenge. For those who have played multiple MMO’s how hard was it getting to max level? If you want crushing challenge there’s always an open world arpg like Dark Souls which actually rewards skillful play and doesn’t use artificial difficulty to to masquerade as challenge.
It’s getting more and more difficult to bear with Anet’s missteps. It’s fine when they make mistakes, we all do. But, I have begun to question their reality testing ability, knowledge of gaming genre, and judgment.
I am just going to keep assuming they don’t actually play their own game.
This class will always be kitten until they decide that the pet is no longer the class gimmick.
Nerf the unliving stupid bajeeezus out of all the pets, put the power into the ranger(the player!), and tweak some “f” skills around the dumb critter that is out. Hate it, love it, I don’t really care anymore, it’s the only way ranger will ever become interesting for me.
+1, and hey guess what? This is what the Guild Wars 1 Ranger was! Pet was an option (used a skill slot), and your character retained 100% damage.
WTB my GW1 Ranger back.
Too bad they took everything we did well and gave it to other professions.
Warriors/Thieves deal better range weapon damage.
Mesmers have better pets.
Virtual every other class feels like they can CC better.
They even gave our kitten preps to the theif (venoms).
All we have are traps and they are just as lackluster here as they were in GW1.
Pets have no agony resistance and don’t share any equipped resistance in your gear. You can try to do double digit fractals, but be prepared to have any damage and utility from your pet to be nullified in any fight where it matters.
Not that pets were worth a kitten against legendaires anyway.
I’d say just farm low levels until you get your condensed mists and then not bother on the Ranger. Maybe one day they will address the issue but I wouldn’t advise anyone hold their breath.
As far as the fights go, I found that using a shortbow with the pierce trait lets me deal with mob clusters pretty well and cycling with a LB for the vulnerability helps in boss fights.
Oh no, now you might have to actually try a little bit when you farm for stuff in the game.
We should just merge this with the thread kittening about how they can’t abuse the hell out of stealth kits anymore so we can have a concise list of people who only want to put in the absolute minimum and expect everything for it in return.
I just feel lied to at this point. Rangers were promised fixes back in November and we’ve gotten nothing of note what-so-ever. Guardians and Elementalists, two classes that were essentially fine if not overtuned got twice the attention Rangers did.
At this point, I’m not even questioning understaffing or a lack of knowledge on the issues. At this point, the only explanation is that Jon’s “balance team” spends most of their day sitting on Reddit at work instead of doing their jobs. Their old NCSoft brethren at Paragon Studios overhauled entire classes in 4 month time periods while Rangers still have entirely messed up trait lines (1 second bleeds, 1 second might?!) and not even an acknowledgement of the true problems.
Whats going on?
1. They are flat out incompetent. Their kitten random tweaks don’t deny this.
2. They just don’t give a kitten. Lack of any attention to still glaring faults in the game. We already paid our ~$60. What do they care if we stick around.
3. They are kitten from being beaten by a Ranger/s during the beta and still haven’t gotten over it. Nothing to support this directly, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all given that we were actually good and then got Smiter’s Boon‘d something fierce and haven’t received any love since.
What a disappointing update. I still enjoy my Ranger in pvp, but I’d like to join dungeon parties and not feel useless.
The beauty of it that you don’t need to feel useless at all. Once you get into double digit fractals and agony gets thrown around left and right we are useless.
Regarding the trait, in all honesty, pulling all conditions off you every 10 seconds seemed a bit…much. I think it is a fair change.
Not when ANet acknowledged that rangers suffer from an apex predator syndrome when it comes to build viability, and then after that acknowledgement, instead of increasing factors that would significantly benefit other builds, the decrease the effectiveness of a trait that decreased the effectiveness of some of the only viable builds rangers can run.
Essentially, they just participated in the “whack-a-mole” style nerfing they claimed they were attempting to avoid, especially because nothing was increased in competitive viability in return.
They’ll probably use the same excuse they used for not addressing conditions. “Costs too much”
No their classic bullkitten line is “technical issues/limitations”.
Like in GW1 when we were told time and again that 7 hero teams were literally impossible due to technical limitations and low and behold they can all of a sudden do it without any major adjustments to the game engine.
I am surprised they having polished this one off yet but I guess they are afraid to actually admit there are any technical issues with the game at all. Might hurt the sale of froofroo backpacks.
guess why we didnt get a major buff? they fixed our Laurel boxes….
jk jk, anyways, daggers might be worth using a whole lot more now…. trait offhand skills and you get like 10s cooldown or something
It’s a somewhat solid skill and I seem to get a lot of crits with it for some reason, but It’s not very reliable. The projectile speed is slow as hell so it’s often not worth using unless your target is very close <700 or is running directly away from you. I wouldn’t even bother trying to use it at the traited 1200 range because it will never hit something moving.
Dam if I’m gonna pick up a GS…I’m a ranger kitten I want my bow buffs and my spirits and my pets to WORK!!! This is unacceptable, truly ridiculous now.
I wouldn’t bother anyway. The thing still hits like a pool noodle. I only use it in WvW so swoop can move me around faster and I get the feeling that the other GS classes are just laughing to themselves when they see me with it equipped.
Guard has other uses before more people complain about it…
Guard grants 10 or more seconds of Protection to the pet, with 24 second traited cooldown this is very significant.
Guard makes your pet more efficient by staying in one area instead of running back to you (especially useful if you are upstairs and it is down).
Guard makes your pet more efficient because it chooses its own targets in a distant area without mobs having to aggro on you or you hitting them.
Guard allows you to essentially ground-target F2 skills.
Guard grants stealth to the pet, which can be used for a sneak attack of a long-activation f2 skill like Firebreathing.
Guard allows you to grab mob aggro in two different places simultaneously.
Guard can be used to save your pet’s life by dropping aggro (though this may not work with new stealth aggro rules.)
Guard allows you to send an invisible pet to attack someone while you hide behind a building/ridge. Pet appears out of thin air with no ranger in sight.
Guard allows you to attack targets at range 4000, especially useful for hitting siege equipment.
Guard allows you to send a Reef Drake just enough into the water to use Sonic Barrier, which you can then use for Chaos Amor or Confusing Arrows on land.
I could go on…
It should be a pet F[number] command. NOT occupying 1/3 skill spots.
^ This. Whether Guard is useful or not, there are other skills that could, and often should, be taken instead.
All this did is put the final nail in the coffin for WvW rangers. Now we are just left to camping on siege since we no longer have anything the class can do that another can’t do better.
Lol no, not even in the right hands. Its still a crappy weapon. If it was good, Id be on my ranger all day, instead Im on my engineer. No its not a learn to play issue either, Im actually good.
I use LB in Paids. Your argument is invalid.
Usage does not equate to effectiveness or being an optimal choice. So technically, neither argument is truly logically valid.
Although based on my own experience and testing with the longbow, inside of 1000 range there is no point at which the longbow ever outperforms the shortbow. This was confirmed numerically showing that rapid fire outputs an almost equivalent amount of damage to the shortbow autoattack.
This also means that unless somehow a person can keep an opponent at farther than 1000 range and then force them to eat auto attacks over a fairly mediocre time-to-kill period, the longbow doesn’t have a real purpose other than being a preference.
In a 1 0n 1 situation under 1000 range I never use the LB autoattack. 1 shot might get fired before I have time to switch weapons but the KB recharge, the 10 stacks of vulnerabilty, and the rapid fire (easily used with quickness) equates to a pretty good weapon with CC and dmg. If you stay in LB while at point blank range then sb would have a strong advantage.
The question posted by the OP is, “Is Ranger Longbow really this bad?” By posting my background with it I was simultaneously answering this question by saying LB is good and saying that LB is viable pvp weapon when in the right hands. Granted I have not seen ANYONE who can use it well. I can. So therefore my opinion of the weapon is that it is a good weapon and just like any other weapon, if the weapon is in the right hands then it is a good weapon.
Feel free to back up your amazing claims of talent with some kind of evidence if there is any. Claiming the LB is viable in pvp is one thing, but claiming that you, and only you, have unlocked it’s true power is something else entirely.
Actually, many swords are not as heavy as they look or as people think they are. I’ve held some marvelously light longswords in real life. People think these things are hugely heavy, but let me ask you this? How heavy is mithril? Orichalcum?
We simply don’t know how heavy these swords really are.
When you rolled a ranger, you chose to be a pet class, making you anything else would make you less unique, you “are” a pet class.
Right, except, when you design a pet class you are supposed to make it so the pet/s actually help the class. A lot of games have body blocking so having a minion that can prevent the enemy from reaching you is a very good thing. GW2 doesn’t have this so that’s out the window. Some others design the class to deal superior damage when the minions/pet are alive but deal much less as a balance when the minion is dead. The ranger deals piddly DPS at optimal circumstances with the pet often being of 0 use in WvW zerg combat so we don’t have that either.
Ultimately you can call the ranger a “pet class” but when we lack any real benefit that is traditionally attributed to a minion class, we are really just a weak warrior with a big chunk of our DPS and utility locked up in an npc for no good reason.
We are the only class where our unique mechanic actually forces us to work harder so it doesn’t become a liability rather than just simply help us.
Doesn’t seem so to me or anyone I know. If they dropped the ball I wouldn’t see more and more people everyday. Seems to me like a few people grasping onto some 5 year old “manifesto” like it’s the bible can’t stop telling everyone the sky is falling when it’s actually raining gold.
Because it’s unreasonable to expect them to stick to their word when, for many, that was the reason they bought the game in the first place?
Nice to see some people so indoctrinated that they couldn’t care less about getting bullkittened as long as their virtual skinner box keeps lighting up…
If thats true, when? the rate of there updates we will have to wait a little to much
Their updates are the best I’ve seen in the MMO world. What other game gives free monthly updates? None that I can think of besides maybe Eve Online(but thats also p2p). They’re giving you free content. Every month. And all you can do is complain that you want more. With most games you would have to pay for the updates in the form on expansion packs and DLCs, but Anet is giving you them for free. Be happy.
It’s a purely business decision. If they didn’t update the game on a regular basis to keep it fresh and interesting they would lose players. Lost players means less people buying gems and a lower game population is less likely to attract new customers to buy the game and gems.
With that in mind, I really don’t see what the problem is with how we get laurels. Ya, it sucks that it will take a very long time to get the fancy minis or the cat potion, but the other gear is easy to get and making it any more instant gratification’y would just cause everyone to get bored again. It’s grind, but at least you know exactly where the finish line is and don’t have to rely on bogus RNG systems to make it across. Just enjoy the new shiny’s and the much more interesting daily system.
Take root works pretty much everytime from me. The conditions you have still tick away so using the condition removal signet before hand followed by the 6 second invulnerability signet is a good idea.
I might of had conditions on me. All I remember was activating it because I had a warrior and thief on me with only a few thousand life left and I was stomped while the effect was still on me and died proper the second the vines went away which was about a second later.
I just tested this with wolf. The cooldown is 45 seconds regardless of when you swap it back. If you howl with wolf, swap, wait 25 seconds, swap again, there’s still 20 seconds left on the timer.
The timer does not pause when swapped as OP is apparently trying to say. This isn’t a “huge nerf”. It’s a minor change to correct behavior that was unintentionally shortening a CD. Relax everyone, the world isn’t falling apart.
No, all it is is a “fix” that just ends up making an already weak pvp class even weaker. No biggie. I’m sure all the fine folks who relied on cycling through pets to achieve maximum effectiveness* won’t be negatively impacted at all by this.
*virtually anyone who had any hope of getting kills in spvp
How much hp does entangle have? I think I’d still rather use take root over entangle. 3 second invulnerability and 4 seed turrets are too good to pass up. 3 seconds where your pet is still attacking your target and your active conditions are still eating away at them.
I have actually been stomped while in a take root so I wouldn’t rely on the “invulnerable” perk too much. The other major problem with entangle is that it stops working if they leave the vines which means if they can teleport or get hit with knock-backs/pulls they are freed from the effect entirely.
It’s pretty good in pve assuming CC isn’t being thrown around but it’s not worth passing RaO over in pvp even with this fix.
Can someone please explain this to me as I’ve seen it a lot on this thread?
I’ve seen a lot of people saying they don’t want their pet out at all and instead want increased damage, but to me pets are a part of the class that you have to learn to work around. So when people say they don’t want pets at all it kinda seems like they are trying to change the class into something that it’s not. That’s just the impression I’m getting anyway.
Rangers have both melee and ranged options so why not opt for a Warrior or Thief. They both have melee and ranged from what I’ve heard. So why play a class with a mechanic you dislike instead of going to another class that you might like better?
I’m not trying to insult anyone or start an arguement, I’m just curious as to why. I see it being said a lot and I can never understand it. I can understand stowing your pet to skip mobs or something, but it seems like most people just don’t want a pet at all.
Because some of us played a ranger for 7 years in GW1 without ever using the pet for anything more than a minion factory meatshield (before they nerfed that). It worked just fine. The problem is that they made every class viable at long range and our sole unique mechanic is so kitten buggy and hard to use that it actually slows the whole class down rather than help us like the other classes. You never hear warriors complain about issues with adrenaline skills or thieves over initiative because those work and help the class. All the pet does is cause us to share dps/utility with a really stupid npc that just loves to grab mobs like a dust mop and can’t be effective without me mashing F1 and F3 constantly.
I have no problem with the pet from a conceptual point and was even excited when they said it would be a core element of the class rather than a build option because that meant that it might be helpful but it just doesn’t work and they have shown that they either don’t care or are unable to make it work so the only real alternative is to ask for a play mode without the pet entirely.
It’s a lot different for me, personally. During GW1 I waited a long time for them to buff pet skills, and when they did, I had a straight beastmaster build using a staff and HaO as my elite.
It was amazing in PVP modes like fort aspenwood. My pet was literally a tank, it tore through people like paper. And it helped that I had gotten to People Know Me, so it was great fun watching a giant rainbow phoenix shred people and siege turtles to bits.
I expected from the start that this would be a pet class. If you treat it as such, put 30 points in beastmastery, you’ll have a great time. It’s what I’ve done, and I’m having fun. (Drake buff makes me smile, too.)
I’ve been mostly running a 20/20/20/10/0. I wouldn’t have a problem shifting around points and making up the difference with more focused stat bonuses from accessories, but the pet traits just don’t offset losing things like bow range+/pierce arrows and weapon cool down reductions.
Letting off a piercing point blank shot into a zerg and watching 12 people fly back is just not worth parting with lol.
Can someone please explain this to me as I’ve seen it a lot on this thread?
I’ve seen a lot of people saying they don’t want their pet out at all and instead want increased damage, but to me pets are a part of the class that you have to learn to work around. So when people say they don’t want pets at all it kinda seems like they are trying to change the class into something that it’s not. That’s just the impression I’m getting anyway.
Rangers have both melee and ranged options so why not opt for a Warrior or Thief. They both have melee and ranged from what I’ve heard. So why play a class with a mechanic you dislike instead of going to another class that you might like better?
I’m not trying to insult anyone or start an arguement, I’m just curious as to why. I see it being said a lot and I can never understand it. I can understand stowing your pet to skip mobs or something, but it seems like most people just don’t want a pet at all.
Because some of us played a ranger for 7 years in GW1 without ever using the pet for anything more than a minion factory meatshield (before they nerfed that). It worked just fine. The problem is that they made every class viable at long range and our sole unique mechanic is so kitten buggy and hard to use that it actually slows the whole class down rather than help us like the other classes. You never hear warriors complain about issues with adrenaline skills or thieves over initiative because those work and help the class. All the pet does is cause us to share dps/utility with a really stupid npc that just loves to grab mobs like a dust mop and can’t be effective without me mashing F1 and F3 constantly.
I have no problem with the pet from a conceptual point and was even excited when they said it would be a core element of the class rather than a build option because that meant that it might be helpful but it just doesn’t work and they have shown that they either don’t care or are unable to make it work so the only real alternative is to ask for a play mode without the pet entirely.
I would be fine with a fix to the cool down ‘workaround’ if they had also reduced the ridiculous cast times on the pet skills. The wolf’s howl should fire off just as fast as the warrior’s AoE fear, there’s no reason to give it a two second windup other than to telegraph to everyone what is about to happen so they can move away or so it can die before it has a chance to scatter a zerg.
Stealth: We don’t need as many stealth abilities as a thief, but we should have access to a decent utility stealth skill.
Ranger Pet Progression: Ranger pets need to improve REGARDLESS of the trait paths you choose. Choose Marksmanship? Great your pets improve along a path that compliments longbow. Unlike Necro pets, Rangers CANNOT ignore the fact they have a pet without losing out on being 100% efficient. If pets are not optional then it is unfair to force us into one path with the bulk of the traits. Basically all traitlines should improve pets, but depending on the path you take your pets abilities and options are different than a ranger who specced in a different way.
Ranger Pet F2 – Cooldowns on F2 need to be severely lowered on most. More commands need to be added.
[Guard]: needs to be removed as a utility and added to F4 and once pet is set to guard duration should be permanent until the ranger moves out of pet range or until killed. This would add in strategic use for pet as sentry points in WvW.
Flying Pets – Should legitimately be able to fly up a wall and attack those you can get click target on.
Spider Pets – Should legitimately be able to climb up a wall and attack those you can get a click target on.
None Flying/Spider Pets – Should have the climb walls issue fixed
You can place pets on walls with Guard. You just have to be very careful about how you target it or it wont work right and the pet will just sit at the base of the wall. It’s a quick, dirty way of killing siege. The only caveat is that you obviously have to be able to target the siege that you want them to kill.
I just thought I’d way in as a player with a Ranger main and a (non-traditional) Thief that I usually take to WvW.
Any player can beat any player on any given Sunday. Things happen.
The largest strength of the Thief class is their ability to pick their fights:
“See that guy? I think I’ll kill him. Oh wait, he hurts and is super beefy! Pull out!”
Thieves disengage so easily. It’s what they do. If a fight doesn’t go their way, they leave. And do you know what they do then? They come back and try again while your stunbreakers and elites are on cooldown, and then you die.
This, this sooo very much.
I’m so tired of seeing people talk about how they kill thieves left and right when any thief that isn’t stroking out will disengage with stealth, heal and then destroy you while all your skills are on cool down or just simply run away. No good thief will stand and fight to the last health point when they can so easily avoid death.
Does anybody know exactly what time on the 28th the patch will be implemented?
I doubt Anet even knows that. Big patches can take a lot of last minute testing and work, so basically the release is “some time on the 28th in PST zone”
The ability to actually kill an opposing player? Too much to ask? bah.
Was defending Garrison the other day, found an either lagged out warrior or someone who got into the lord room and went afk, or worse he was ignoring me. Dumped 3 sets of cool downs into him…. Never budged his health bar below 10%. Finally he wandered away, ignoring me.
Unless you were a lvl 5 trying to kill a lvl 80 I don’t see how this could be possible without some kind of bug.
They haven’t really changed anything at all except that now arrows fly fast enough to not miss targets 80% of the time and pets seem to be able to hit moving targets pretty reliably. Other than that, everything else is the same so you will probably have no problem rolling with what you used before.
Could be a glitch with the ranger stealth trait, although I have been running into a lot of people in WvW lately that have figured out ways to exploit culling and disappear if they are just maybe 10 feet from you although it usually takes multiple people almost all of top of one another to pull it off.
They other thing to remember is that the engine takes several seconds to fully “decloak” a persons character despite them leaving stealth. It’s the reason a thief can burst you down and not truly appear until they are already in the process of stomping you.
“Quit giving bad information bro.
We can get out of entangle with abilities like Infiltrators Strike, Infiltrators Arrow, Shadow Step to name a few.
AoEs are only going to put them on cooldown, and your number “5” abilities which gives you your AoEs are easy to dodge out of, with minimal damage.
There is no possible way you could kill a good Thief, and if you think you can, I’ll bet you 1 gold per duel, and beat you multiple times until you run out of gold. I’ll even wager 2 gold, and let you bring a second Ranger, after I’ve beat you at least 20 times.
I’ve never seen worse information given on any forum, for any game ever.”
What do you guys make of this? Apparently, this was in response to me saying I rarely lose to cloak and dagger thieves in dubs.
Is this just hubris? Any rangers want to battle this person? He or she claims to reside in SoS.
Here’s the basic claim: “There is no possible way you could kill a good Thief”. That’s a challenge to all of us.
He has called you out. Why don’t you duel him ?
That’s absurd.
Absurd how ? I get tired of seeing Rangers come on here looking for advice only to get bombarded from a special few that say it is easy for Rangers to kill Thiefs. Apparently a thief saw those claims and called BS…which = calling the keyboard warriors out.
Because then they would have to put up or shut up and they just don’t have time for that when they could be posting more about how their pet “stun locks” them.
It’s all well and good that you have so much fun playing the Ranger, but please don’t act like it doesn’t need help. It needs it, it needs it badly.
Since the only way to get the dev’s attention on issues (they don’t play the class themselves so don’t expect them to figure anything out on their own unless all you want is pointless underwater buffs) is to kitten and complain, that is all we can do until it stops being the worst pvp class and we stop having 1/3 of our damage die at the drop of a hat in any lvl 80+ content.
And, no one is here because they hate the class. We wouldn’t have picked it if we did and we sure as hell wouldn’t give a kitten about it being on par with everyone else if we didn’t like it. We’d probably just roll a thief if we hated it so much.
We used to be able to res the pet and then they took it away from us for reasons I still don’t fully understand to be honest. It even worked like player rezing so it would go faster the more people joined in on it. It used to be a pet would limp back to you in the zerg and be back out in a few seconds.
Anet’s definition of a ranger is indicative of it being ranged, so that’s all that matters.
Rangers are proficient with the bow. They rely on a keen eye, a steady hand, and the power of nature to slay their targets. Their loyal pets, which rangers tame and train, distract enemies while the rangers strike safely from a distance. As an adventurer profession, rangers wear medium armor
Rangers rely on a keen eye, a steady hand, and the power of nature itself. Unparalleled archers, rangers are capable of bringing down foes from a distance with their bows. With traps, nature spirits, and a stable of loyal pets at their command, rangers can adapt to any situation
Their own definitions. So let’s stop the parroted “Rangers aren’t ranged” argument when clearly anet defines them as such. Which is where the largest issue comes from when people speak of the ranger.
False. Being good at range does not necessitate being bad at melee. You cannot call Rangers (or any other class) a ‘ranged’ class (or a ‘melee’ class). Why? Because no such designation exists in GW2’s class design philosophy. Why? Because it’s a terrible class design philosophy. The class designs are thematic, not gamist. The ranger class encompasses everything you might consider a ranger to be – a tracker, a ranger, a skirmisher, and utilitarian, a survivalist. The same for every other class.
I’ll consider us “Trackers” when we can finally detect stealthed thieves (glowing foot prints maybe?) Until then, we are just a guy with a dog. Also, the only reason to even have a minion of any sort is to allow you to operate at range while your minion soaks up damage/attention. Without that kind of mechanic, any buff they give us might as well just be part of the class inherently. Why have a melee player and a melee pet hit each for 10 when you could just have the player alone hit for 20?
It makes for a fun role play type of class but mechanically it’s completely superfluous. It’s especially evident in pvp and Orr where the enemies completely ignore your pet all together.
Because Anet does a poor job of class/skill balance. Always have and always will. They are starting to encroach on Blizzard levels though to be honest.
Serious question: Do any “weapon skills” NOT work like this? I can’t think of one. Warhorn on Warriors also has the red target bar under it. I think this may be a problem with the way all weapon skills are set up and I’m not so sure this would actually be an easy fix.
To the issue at hand though, why do you not have your pet on passive when traveling anyway? I’m sorry, but that’s “Ranger-101”. Its way too easy for your pet to get pegged with an attack and go off retaliating, officially screwing yourself and your team. You’ve gotta keep that pet on the leash, and complaining about it being a “hassle” is not a valid excuse. If I forgot to swap him to passive and he goes off after the nearest enemy after a single arrow was fired my way or after I use a “weapon skill”, its my fault, not the game’s.
The red bar is a universal indicator of range for skills. Since the horn buffs consider allies as targets, they will take them into account. Just don’t let it off near an enemy npc that you are trying to run past or it will consider it an attack and put you in combat mode. It’s the same for neutral wildlife.
As a person who plays a Ranger as his main, but also has a fully geared 80 Warrior, 80 Thief, and 80 Guardian I have never lost a fight to any single Ranger, and as a matter of fact, I’ve never lost a 2v1 against two Rangers.
I’ve had another Ranger I downed down my Ranger at the same time, but I won, Rallied, and went about my marry way, but no Ranger has come close to killing any of my other toons.
Is the Ranger the worst class? Well, I havn’t played the Engineer, but fighting them, I would have to give that trophy to the Engineer as being the worst class. The Ranger and Necromancer are fighting for second to last place.
The only time I ever even came close to dying to another ranger was one guy who knew how to kite with the SB like a beast. Every other one I have fought has either tried to kill me with some sort of tank GS build or just stood as I melted his face off with a sword/QZ while trying to kill me at pointblank with a longbow.
We are pretty bad as a class, but I think a lot of the negative image is just from an overabundance of very bad players using the class which kind of makes sense since most good players would switch to something that works better.
We have already had statements that horse mounts do not fit into the GW lore.
Source? There are a few NPCs talking about horses in the game.
But +1 for the Riding Broom, it’s really confusion.
There shouldn’t be. 7 Years of Gw1 and 5 months of GW2 and there have been exactly 0 horses with whole lot of dolyaks and few sparse oxen. We even had a few dwarves on drakes, but no horses.
We have Iron Horse Mines, but there has never been an actual horse in the game.
Just want to step in here for a second to comment on a few speculations:
There will be no mounts, no Cantha and no dragons coming with this story arc.
Sorry if that destroyed some dreams.
No mounts? Good.
No Cantha/Elona? No problem, I’ll wait.
No dragons coming? Errr….does that mean the events introduced will not be part of the greater storyline?
I sincerely hope Flame and Frost will not be anything like Southsun Cove which was terrible from a lore standpoint. It could have happened in any other MMO world since it has absolutely no link to Tyria per se: an arbitrary company disturbing a new arbitrary race for a one time, yet meaningless event…leading to said race’s demise.
If Flame and Frost involved Primordus and Jormag minions scouring the lands, terrorizing the people, that would make me feel like I am back in the game…as opposed to constantly doing Fractals which feels beside the actual world of Guild Wars.
Please bring back more lore to the game, I want my gameplay to be driven by storyline and not solely for the quest of loot. Heck, give Fractals more of a semblance of a narrative! Less content like Southsun Cove which I will ultimately not care about once the loot chest has despawned.
For example…more hints to the origins of the dragons, the previous races (especially the seers), and even the conclusion to the Mursaat called Lazarus the Dire. There is so much story to be told and expanded upon, instead of introducing crabs that really don’t matter (unless they are minions of the Deep Sea Dragon and will have their backstory fleshed out later).
Also…cut scenes with “visions” of the human gods…would be so cool to hear a double-voiced Lyssa or booming Balthazar telling about the war with Menzies (is that still raging on btw???)
They have retcon’ed (sort of) virtually every bit of lore from GW1 so I really wouldn’t hold your breath.
The male also has a glitch were it will play twp or even three laugh tracks on top of one another just slightly off making seem like it’s a group of people instead of one guy. You can get a pretty cool effect if you spam the emote fast enough.
For the starters, I’m just gonna say I don’t know anything about 3D and stuff, but I’m interested in how dyes work. So I’m sorry if this post seems like driveling, it’s just all observations described in simplest words I know.
I’m actually curious in this what people perceive as this kind of shine. The brighter the color of the surface and the brighter lights, the stronger the “shine” caused by bloom effect (post processing) is. Celestial dye is very bright, if not the brightest dye (dunno, I saw it only on screens), then sure, bloom will be more visible in most areas.
Well, in that case it’s not exactly “shine” but “glow”. But not glow as in light (like emissivity effect on sylvari, or a lamp, or fire, etc).
My guildmates mention that the color of the “shine” changes with some expensive dyes.
I never noticed dyes affecting specular effect in any way. Specular lighting is always specific for the area (for example login screen, it’s bluish), not for the dye, at least that’s what it looks to me.
Unless I’m mistaking it with some kinda environmental/gloss mapping (since visibility of it is increasing in less light), but still, it’s seem to be specific to area, not the dye. I think. It would be nice to know how are our armors made. Are we changing only the diffuse map, or something else when we apply dyes?
In other words, buying an expensive dye, do we pay for color and rarity, or something else too?
As far as I can tell, the specular map is inherent to the armor item and we are simply changing a base color diffuse.
The same effect also shows up on the Twilight Arbor armor set, or at least the heavy set. I’ve seen people use especially vibrant colors on it and it almost looks like it has a built in incandescence although I imagine it’s some byproduct of the shaders they used to get that waxy reflective quality of leaves.
They also had a weird effect in the first game where Black dye (the most expensive) would be so dark it would completely wash out the normal/bump map and create a sort of black void effect while other armors would get an odd purple color instead.
Honestly, for me it was realizing I couldn’t play a Ranger the way I wanted to play them. I wanted to be an unsurpassed bowman with a decent sword backup while my pet(if I wanted to use him at all) performed harassment duties. Unfortunately, the game forces you to build around your pet, instead of the other way around.
I run a 20/20/20/10/0 build in W3, and I can’t for the life of me figure out where I’m going to take the points from to put into BM. I need both LB and GS cooldown reduction traits. I alternate between the “pierce targets” and “LB dmg/range” traits depending on the situation. And without “Nature’s Protection” I would die a lot more than I already do to backstabs. Any suggestions?
Just roll with what you have. The pet is nothing but a liability in WvW. I only really use it for the various F2 utility skills and as a bit of added pressure on a downed enemy that I can’t reach to stomp. Other than that, they really don’t do much unless you go full BM in which case you will die very, very quickly because no one is going to go for the pet instead of you regardless of your build.
It’s the same basic problem they had in the first game and in GW1 the pet was a beefcake and a half, not kitten NPC that you have to micromanage like a little sibling your mother made you watch all day.
Even just letting us set a mode where it automatically attacks what you attack, switching targets immediately and breaking off combat the same way would be a huge improvement.
+1 To Anet for giving us a bald eagle for a pet. -50 for them making it a “juvenile eagle” so all we get is a bland brown bird that is indistinguishable from the hawk at a distance.
No reason to pick a ranger over any of the other classes in a dungeon.
lol I shouldn’t even have bothered. You’ve already made up your mind about the Ranger, regardless of what anyone has to say.
My mind isn’t made up. There’s just no solid reason for me to play/pick a Ranger in a dungeon other than “enjoyment”.
The Ranger is NOT a good class.
^ This
Right now, the Ranger is a fun, joke leisure class. “Woo I’m a sniper with a pet wolf!”
It’s not good, in fact, it’s pretty kitten bad in any form of PvP. We are also the only class who’s core class mechanic can be deactivated by the enemy. I can’t turn off an enemy Warrior’s adrenaline or a Thief’s initiative but it’s perfectly acceptable for our pets to be killed when nearly half our traits and skills revolve around them and the ones that don’t use the pet are still pretty crappy. Just compare vipers nest to needle trap. Needle does twice the poison, has 10 seconds shorter cool down and does a 3 second immobilize.
There’s just really nothing especially good about the class. I hear tales of how we were a force to be reckoned with in the Betas but the staff has obviously Smiter’s Boon’d us because there is no way that was the ranger we have now.
I agree with your proposal but I feel I must point out that your facts about piercing are incorrect. Flesh is EXTREMELY difficult to fully pierce with an arrow for a multitude of reasons, one being that the arrow projectile is very large. An arrow is great for killing but it is nearly impossible to pierce through an unarmored human body with it. Furthermore, the arrow heads are tapered which maximizes damage but will eventually stop the arrow in the human body. On the other hand, Flintlocks from the 1600s fired a .8 caliber round that could easily pierce up to 2 human bodies completely.
I can be set on fire and hit with a sword the size of surfboard and be completely fine. Real world physics don’t really have much of a place in a fantasy game like this.
Depends on the situation, I use the longbow in the overworld, but the short bow is often better for dungeons because you will be hard pressed to keep at max range. I’d use both equally if we could have 3 weapon sets so I didn’t have to forgo using the sword.
