I still think that a straight up damage denial (complete miss) beyond the initial strike is sort of cheating people out of a lot of damage and combos.
I know right! Imagine if everyone had to bring some condition removal and watch their bars before blowing cooldowns… That would be horrible!
We already have Daze and Stun. Those do what you’re asking (shutting down burst damage—in addition to many other things). Blindness doesn’t need to be that powerful, but it also shouldn’t be as weak as it is right now (it’s currently the worst interrupt in the game instead of a proper condition). I think that giving it an initial total miss (an interrupt) and following that up with a 50% chance for a 50% damage reduction in proceeding attacks (including critical hits; or maybe even a complete nullification of critical hits since, well, you’re blind—enjoy trying to find and hit my weak spot) is balanced step between where it is now and the game-bending effects of Daze and Stun.
Quite evidently they are used in exactly opposite way – to shut down target while bursting them. How many skills applying it are used defensively? I would say somewhere close to none.
I’d be perfectly happy with GW1 blindness. Flat 75% chance to miss for X duration. Of course duration of current GW2 blindness will need to be significantly reduced. This way it would be a reliable anti-burst tool, as opposed to yet another spammable condition.
LA is pretty much always in overflow, and 99% of the time I really don’t care. There is no need to shove modal dialog in my face every time I zone in there. Please make it a widgety panel above the map or something, with buttons to queue and unqueue. Please do not queue by default.
Various other dialogs need to remember their position. Fractal dialogs in particular tend to popup when I am still doing something and I need to be able to see center of my screen.
No one said you won’t be able to see the personal level of each party member. This system’s gonna be great for friends and guildies that have similiar but not identical levels. It should be implemented from day one.
No one say you will be able to. That’s the only thing that bothers me. As long as it is easy to tell who is on which level (or how much AR they have), it should be ok.
You can get up to +35% boon duration. (giver trinkets + giver armor with 2 s.rune of monk giving +15% boon duration). I think that’s pretty neat. I’m sure you can go higher for boon duration. I just don’t know how effective this will be in combat (as you have 0 power/prec/condi dmg). A full support I guess.
Unfortunately, you’re giving up over a thousand stats for it. You can just equip 2 water runes and 2 monk runes for 30% boon duration instead. Giver stats are AWFUL. Anyone with significant amounts of Giver gear is dead weight in a group.
That is the downside. But you can equip both water and monk runes ANd the giver to get an exagerated amount of +boon duration. so that’s… +48% boon duration from armors alone. Idk if the 18% will be worth it though, that’s the problem. I think it’ll benefit more from people with mass aoe heal/regen or people who benefit from healing other people.
Or you can just get +20% boon duration food and not gimp yourself with crappy gear.
stop trolling me >_> you and i both know you can get an additional at least 16% boon duration from the items. What makes or breaks it is if its worth it, or if there’s a build that can fully utilize this and still be effective in combat.
Compare it to bonus from food you could otherwise get. Realize that you are losing metric ton of stats. No, it is obviously not worth it.
You can get up to +35% boon duration. (giver trinkets + giver armor with 2 s.rune of monk giving +15% boon duration). I think that’s pretty neat. I’m sure you can go higher for boon duration. I just don’t know how effective this will be in combat (as you have 0 power/prec/condi dmg). A full support I guess.
Unfortunately, you’re giving up over a thousand stats for it. You can just equip 2 water runes and 2 monk runes for 30% boon duration instead. Giver stats are AWFUL. Anyone with significant amounts of Giver gear is dead weight in a group.
That is the downside. But you can equip both water and monk runes ANd the giver to get an exagerated amount of +boon duration. so that’s… +48% boon duration from armors alone. Idk if the 18% will be worth it though, that’s the problem. I think it’ll benefit more from people with mass aoe heal/regen or people who benefit from healing other people.
Or you can just get +20% boon duration food and not gimp yourself with crappy gear.
I like the added challenge and all, but the problem is the people. Lots of people that do it. It is too often too hard to keep track of your own character when there is like 20 people start jumping at the same time. Easy to screw up timing. I imagine it is even worse for people playing Asura toons.
Perhaps ANet could make it so that when there are many other characters next to you, they render semi-transparent. Or something else…
I’m guessing just go to level 1 with magic find and destroy continually spawning mob’s (like dredge) until you get the drop. Unless someone has gathered some data or a dev wants to spill it, that’s probably the best bet, no?
Continuously respawning mobs do not drop loot… nor do they trigger “on kill” charges and trait effects.
I play guardian I don’t really see the point in stacking. 2 guardians will be better than 1, but 3 guardians will not offer much beyond 2… aside from reduced DPS.
The poison doesn’t do much damage, so there is no point to bother with fans. The main damage source is the darts that boss is fanning around. They cannot be reflected, but they can be body blocked. Competent guardian can tank the entire fight (~3-4 cycles given group DPS is alright), while rest stand directly behind him and unload DPS.
Yeah the darts. A competent guardian uses aegis and/or something else? I don’t have a guardian so don’t know exactly what to encourage on a non-competent guardian xD
I thought those darts were poison darts that only shoot around when the gas is active, hence ‘same thing’
There is no trick to it. You just stand there and tank it. The guardian doesn’t need anything special, just healing/tank build.
I run AH-based build with Soldier’s runes and 3 shouts for my utility. I use a hammer and a staff for this fight. I can confidently tank it for 3 cycles without any external healing. 4 cycles may get tough. If your group gets to 5 cycle, then you should probably find another group.
Needless to say that it is even easier if your group drops some party heals.
Regarding the poison cloud and the darts: Yes and no. Boss will start spinning when the cloud is up, but turning on the fan doesn’t stop him.
Most people dont use the tactic shown in the youtube video you have linked.
Good, because that seemed p cheesy if it was “the trick” to do Tom at higher fotm levels.
A couple PUGs ago we had a guy who would just leeroy straight into the room before anyone had the chance to run the crystals. Another time a guy insisted we didnt need to run the crystals first because the boss was easy, etc. A lot can go wrong in PUGs xD. definitely makes sense to run them first so the ranged can concentrate on DPSing rather than running crystals during the fight
ok good to know about 3 dedicated ranged dps’ers at the stations, and that there are precisely 8 crystals
Your PUG was right. You can and should do that.
The poison doesn’t do much damage, so there is no point to bother with fans. The main damage source is the darts that boss is fanning around. They cannot be reflected, but they can be body blocked. Competent guardian can tank the entire fight (~3-4 cycles given group DPS is alright), while rest stand directly behind him and unload DPS.
1. Rangers aren’t designed for spike damage, they are constant, steady DPS. Rangers deal the same damage as other high damage classes given a set period of time on a single target. Yes, we wont see 10k crits anytime soon, but we get lots of quick 2k double crits from birds and felines instead.
When you add up the numbers, they are still pretty weak. The pet numbers are also completely unreliable, and therefore irrelevant to spike damage.
Steady DPS is good, however… Steady DPS only matters if you can survive long enough to deal it. Guardian can afford to do steady DPS. Ranger not so much.
The rest of your points come down to the same issue. Ranger has to sacrifice all utility and put lots of micro into doing mediocre damage that comes naturally to other classes. Does it make ranger completely useless? No, of course not, but in any competition driven game being significantly behind is the same as being useless.
And for the record: Pets suck. They require too much attention for very marginal return.
I have a workaround for all of you. Invulnerability seems to be triggered by two factors: either being on a piece of terrain that the enemy cannot reach (and therefore cannot hurt you) or when it is pulled a significant distance from its spawn.
Invulnerability auto-triggers all the time when I jump on a big rock or something that the enemy can’t reach (not underwater). This seems to be designed to prevent players from pulling high level monsters to favorable terrain and then killing them from where the player cannot be hurt.
When underwater, monsters trigger invulnerability in two cases. The most common is when the enemy is far from its spawn (especially in terms of the vertical z-axis). If you engage enemies at or near their spawns (preferably at the same height as the enemy), you can avoid triggering invulnerability.
If you engage enemies near the spawns/don’t go to places npcs can’t reach (they can’t jump), invulnerability will rarely/never trigger. It’s all about the terrain you engage them in. If some of you are doubtful, I’ve only had an enemy go “invulnerable” once during the last twenty hours of gameplay. This includes a fair amount of time spent underwater.
Glad to hear that you don’t experience this issue. I however also noticed increase in “invulnerable” stuff after last couple of patches for no apparent reason. I haven’t had this much trouble leveling my ranger, who I did use to pull enemies for significant distances. Now leveling a guardian, who beside dancing in circles pretty much fights in place, I get the invulnerable mobs much much more than I used to. Not just underwater. Veteran mobs on the dry land go invul pretty often as well. I suspect there is some kind of glitch with CCs (knockback and pull in particular) that is causing mobs to think they cannot reach me or something.
In any case this is very real issue. That stuff you describe is correct in a sense that this is how things should work, but there is definitely something going on beyond that.
There is a fundamental issue with pets, that OP fails to comprehend. Pets are AI driven damage dealers. You can’t fix them to match player skill. They will either drag down good players or (if ANet makes them sufficiently smart) carry bad ones. There is no middle ground to that.
The only way to fix that is to get rid of either AI part or damage dealing (and as a result balance or ranger’s own skills around pet’s damage). Of course that would require complete mechanic redesign, so its not going to happen any time soon. Until then ranger will remain bland unimaginative mediocracy.
Haven’t had this happen to me yet, but I personally feel pretty iffy about accepting rangers to a dungeon group. They bring nothing to the table beyond ok DPS. More than one ranger in a group is liable end up in group collapsing under pressure due to lack of support skills.
And yes, I am also leveling alt right now
This is an example of what’s wrong with the Ranger community.
Before the adjustment to the SB animations everyone was saying that Rangers are in a good spot. With that one single adjustment everyone is now crying that Rangers are the worst profession in the game and that one animation suddenly broke everything else.
I can’t help but wonder how many of the people bellyaching on the forums actually have level 80 Rangers that they leveled up in PvE versus people who just played their Ranger since people started realizing that SB was killer in sPvP?
Also, for the record, the reason nobody every noticed the 0.04 second animation glitch is because the human eye is incapable of such a thing.
I have lvl80 ranger, and I played sPvP to r14 until I got bored running SB + Axe/Horn-Torch build. Reality is that SB is our only viable source of damage. Not even burst damage, just plain DPS. Reality is that RoF nerf affected not just attack DPS, but also bleeds application, which constitutes significant portion of our damage. Reality is that people thought rangers were fine, because nobody even bothered with other weapon sets, because SB was (and still is) the only viable option.
Reality is that pets are perpetually dead in dungeons and WvW just from random AoEs flying around, and are next to useless in sPvP.
Now where did you get your ideas, I don’t know. I am guessing you are one of those sub 80s who just realized how super easy it is to level with pet and came here to tell us losers how pro you are.
That is reasonable thinking. I am sure they will eventually fix most of our support skills being useless. That said, the biggest ranger problem is our pet, and nothing short of complete overhaul will fix it.
My LB is Berserkers (Pow/Prec/Crit Damage), SB is Rampagers (Pow/Prec/Condition Damage), and my Axe + Warhorn are both Carrion (POw/Condition Damage/Vit).
Same here.
It makes sense if you look at the skills available for those weapons. Just note that dungeon exotics do not have berserker/rampager/etc prefixes, so you have to look at the stats.
I’ve seen others using it, but there are a lot of people out there that can’t think for themselves. shrugs Sorry I don’t like to propagate people not toying with things and trying to come up with things themselves.
So basically your point is that you are a pro player and we all suck. Got any more insights?
@Skolvikings lets not be setting new lows… I think you know what I mean. And I know exactly what you mean. You are trying to find positive side to things, but that just doesn’t work when you want to be competitive in an online game. Not for me (and most people around here) anyway.
All I have to say is: not viable for PvP and dungeon play. SB + Axe/Horn is still your best option for those. You can use pretty much anything in general PvE and have fun, but that just because anything goes there.
Imo pets shouldn’t deal damage at all. They should provide support/healing/CC and perhaps tanking in PvE… Oh wait, we already have that – they called spirits and are kinda suckish too.
Wait, are you saying other classes don’t get this? WTF! I am off to try it it out…
The amount of irony in your name and what just occurred is absolutely hysterical.
No, Rangers don’t get this magical speed penalty. Yes, pets cannot attack while moving.
When people say Rangers are slower than other classes, they are referring to the other 2 Adventurer professions, the Engineer and Thief, both of which have better passive speed buffs (not swiftness).
I am talking specifically about speed boost being negated while in combat. I am pretty sure it is the case, just wasn’t clear if it affects other professions. I know for fact you can’t use Call of the Wild to run through some mobs, speed boost simply doesn’t work. Naturally I assumed other professions have the same limitation.
I’m just curious in finding out why a ranger is slower in running speed then any other class. One would think a ranger would be swift or be at the same movement speed as other classes
That’s correct Rose, in combat whenever you or the pet attacks targets, you automatically get speed reduction probably by half and it also negates any form of buff speed increased by boon/signet. That’s why the pets even traited with Agility Training (+30% speed increased) could never hit/catch other classes with normal speed. You could say this is another intentional nerf or bug to add in the list
Wait, are you saying other classes don’t get this? WTF! I am off to try it it out…
I don’t care about what was advertised nor etymology of the word. What I care about is that Ranger seem to excel at nothing. Mediocre at range combat and horrid in melee. Poor to no support options.
How is this class supposed to be played? I have no answer to that.
I am sure shortbow nerf made things slightly worse, but the real issue is lack of viable alternatives.
