Guild Wars 2

Zenos Osgorma.2936:

TurtleDragon.3108:

DarkWasp.7291:

Well at least in PvE, Ranger is a top level DPS option.

• Sword auto is brutal
• Stability is very helpful
• Double Path of Scars is brutal
• Double Rapid Fire is brutal
• Two spirits that boost team DPS (Frost gives a 7% increase and Sun works great too)
• Great area condition cleanse
• Perfect candidate to use extra ele weapon summons

So when you hear PvE people saying it’s terrible, they obviously missed the potential.

And all of those are inferrior to having a 2nd ele in the group.

you have no idea what a rangers capabilities are , and most of the rangers you come across in Pugs are not using the class correctly or Using very poor timing + rotations .

spotter + frost is still a very powerful damage boost.
so is the Quickdraw , Gs+Sword/Axe in full zerker gear its Dps is a third higher than that of pre-patch .

there is no point in having a second ele in a pug set up you could be double stacking might wasting 25might so it make no difference if its a 2nd ele or a 2nd warroir or a 2nd guardain , these dungeons can be 4manned regardless of what the 5th is running.

his points are proven facts , over many other threads even DnT on both power and condi builds, of which speed run times are only a few seconds slower than the so called 2nd ele or doubling up on classes.

rangers are great in any mode now.
and honestly there are better builds than those that DnT made.

I mained a ranger for 2-3 years and know what they are capable of, even when they were considered bad and before they got substantial buffs to place them where they are now. Simple fact is, Rangers cannot fullfill the same role as Warrior (Banners), Guardian (Aegis/Stability), Thief (Stealth), or hell, even mesmers (Portals). That leaves them only open to replacing the 2nd Ele in a stnadard dungeon team.

The 2nd Ele brings higher DPS, more ice bows, blasts and is not reliant on clunky sword/pet mechanics. They’re utility is just way better too and can go /f for swirling winds, glyph of storms in air/earth, bring out an earth ele to tank bosses, give FGS to mesmers for their portal and heal/remove conditions.

A ranger brings unique buffs that are unique and situational at best. It’s not a banner that you can bring to every boss and trash mob so it’s not there the entire time. There are plenty of scenarios where you’ll be fighting another trash/boss fight and your frost spirit is still on CD and won’t be benefiting your party. Sword is great and all, but only if you are auto attacking with it at max attack speed (which isn’t hard to do on most of the fights). If you are turn off AA to control it at a slower speeed or slow down in preperation for a dodge, you are losing a ton of DPS while the 2nd ele is just happily doing his rotation with staff/ice bow. Oh, and you can’t path of Scars bosses until after the boss is Frozen.

In speed/record runs, maximum DPS buffs is irrelevant. The difficulty from speed runs comes from what you do in between boss/trash fights. Rangers offer nothing there. Some groups don’t even bring the warrior.

Having said that, most groups will be fine with a ranger instead of a 2nd ele. The ele is just objectively better in every way assuming equal player skill. Ranger is just straight up more work for less reward.

You can do the swap with 1 axe and 1 torch. Put the axe in the MH of the first slot and the torch in the OH of the 2nd slot.

DarkWasp.7291:

Well at least in PvE, Ranger is a top level DPS option.

• Sword auto is brutal
• Stability is very helpful
• Double Path of Scars is brutal
• Double Rapid Fire is brutal
• Two spirits that boost team DPS (Frost gives a 7% increase and Sun works great too)
• Great area condition cleanse
• Perfect candidate to use extra ele weapon summons

So when you hear PvE people saying it’s terrible, they obviously missed the potential.

And all of those are inferrior to having a 2nd ele in the group.

Ghotistyx.6942:

Moral of the story, if you’re playing ranger, play whatever you want.

Fixed. You don’t bring rangers in record runs, or standard dungeon teams. But the difference is not that bad in the second scenario.

SharpenedBlade.6803:

So I should use GS if I’m no good with sword? Really don’t like getting stuck in big attacks because of the auto attack chain, think I’d be better off wielding GS and doing a little less damage but not getting killed all the time.

…Greatsword skills are much more fun anyway imo
(+I’m a huge fan of 2-H weapons myself)

Try the A/T condi build instead. It’s way better DPS than GS. The 12% less dps is misleading, that number is for a GS + SA/ (or LB) rotation. Pure GS is awful.

frifox.5283:

Turtle Dragon.9241:

Am I starting to become Elitist?

You were in IX, it’s in your blood…

Funnily enough, that’s actually not me who posted this thread.

Quarktastic.1027:

TurtleDragon.3108:

You guys are probably forgetting about the increased pet DPS from beast mastery and Remorseless. They also likely chose Sic’em instead of Quickening Zephyr because of Feel My Wrath.

Though, i imagine the difference between the old meta build and this one isn’t very big.

Remorseless with two handed training is just too good to pass up unfortunately. While I’d love to keep running LB/GS like I used to, the utility of the ranger’s offhand weapons is almost necessary in this post patch apocalypse.

Yep, I played around with the build a bit today and the big maul/swoop/path of scar crits are amazing. I feel like there’s no place for Longbow until Remorseless gets changed, since I assume opening strike affects only the first hit of a Rapid Fire.

I’m okay with it, cause I always felt that Barrage into Rapid Fire was clunky, as well as camping one set for the remainder of a fight.

You guys are probably forgetting about the increased pet DPS from beast mastery and Remorseless. They also likely chose Sic’em instead of Quickening Zephyr because of Feel My Wrath.

Though, i imagine the difference between the old meta build and this one isn’t very big.

Sinister build maybe?

I made the Dreamer recently (for my thief) and have been screwing around in solo’s with this. It’s fun to play something other than LB + S/A Frost Spotter once in a while. I haven’t tried it in a group tho (and don’t plan to)

Spirit of Nature is worth a mention in Fractals and bad Arah/Aetherpath groups. You can pull off some clutch self-rezes or group rezes with it. Rampage as One is mostly useless except for the stability in most groups anyways.

Otherwise, you’d just be trying to do the role of other classes that are better at it.

It’s 15s, so it’s not THAT awful. Having said, it’s mostly obsolete due to phalanx warriors being more common and meta than before. It was also never good in any organized group since they had might taken care of by their 1-2 eles.

I was one of the people originally encouraging it over Jaguar, but Jaguar > Jungle Stalker any day right now. It still has it’s niche use for solo/open world content

I also don’t understand the issue here. Every other class has the exact same 600 range issue if they choose to use a ranged weapon instead of being grouped together. If there’s anything Rangers need help with, it isn’t party buffs cause they are already good at buffing the party’s dmg output.

Staff Guardians and Rifle Warriors.

Fluffball.8307:

Edit: I wonder if they actually outdamage warriors before the RF buff? Most people used WH instead of offhand axe. I suspect that’s the case.

Idk, we didn’t have Signet of the Wild (untraited) + Predator’s onslaught back then either so people just viewed rangers as a support class back then. Warriors have also received many nerfs to their dmg since the game’s been released so it’ll also depend at which specific point in time you’re looking at.

I hate how sword auto 3 can get reflected back at you

ThyShadowPaladin.9521:

Tragic Positive.9356:

Rangers are actually one of the new PvE meta.
They surpass guards and warriors in damage at the moment.

AoE unique 15% damage boost. That stacks with Fury and Might.

People do not know that, though, because there’s 1 build that can do that and no other.

How in the world do ranger’s surpass warriors and guardians in DPS? Burst probably, with signet. But other than that, they have horribly low dps and that signet wont recharge anytime soon.

Warriors only give the illusion of high dps and are taken purely for a support role in current meta. It’s not hard to out DPS a phalanx warrior. Guardians aren’t that great either without unscathed contender but last I checked they were on par or slightly better than ranger?

I wouldn’t call rangers meta either, speedrun guilds are running phalanx double staff ele, thief and guardian for their dungeoun tours. Rangers are viable and can replace one of the elementalists, but it’s an objectively worse off composition b/c ele’s are still OP in this meta.

@Moraine
#2, #3, #7 are terrible for groups that don’t even use the LFG system. Why punish those who aren’t even PUGing.

Penalties like the ones you suggested are appropriate for an automated LFG system like the ones you see in other MMORPGs but not the current LFG system we have.

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

What if you had an optional dictator system? If someone wants to protect his own instance and Play How He Wants, he should have a checkbox to do so. If people still want to form their casual groups with no protection from kicks, let them form groups without such a checkbox.

Edit:

ORRR what if the instance owner can choose the kick threshold? IE the person who opens the instance can choose either no kicks, 4 votes required to kick, 3 votes required to kick, 2 votes required, 1 vote required – and make this info available on the LFG

I’d be quite happy with that checkbox even if that was the only thing they added. Just put like a little crown above the profession icon in the listing to show it or something.

Well, I don’t mind having having my post in the spotlight and I know it wasn’t a perfect (or whole) suggestion. Like someone mentioned above you can’t make a system that is fully not exploitable in one way or another. I just don’t want to argue glass is half full vs. half empty.

But yeah, I agree the focus should be on preventing griefing instead of policing and punishing it. Waste of dev resources to go through each dungeon kick case.

At this point I’m done defending my suggestion since it comes down to me thinking “People in this game are generally good and won’t abuse party leader” vs. “People in this game are generally toxic and more vote kicks will happen.” Neither is more correct and you can’t prove either of them. People are also looking at the idea I suggested in a vacuum and are completely ignoring the fact that I mentioned it was an opt-in system and there would be an automated group finder to accompany it with better vote-kick protection (Which I’m sure most people would use cause it’d lazier, faster, easier and most of the game’s content is easy enough to carry 1-2 inexperienced players). If you’re doing a zerker dungeon tour speed farm, you don’t grab 4 ppl form LFG to do it, most of your party is from guild/friends list.

I still want to read other people’s ideas though.

In the unlikely event that anet ever does add challenging instanced group content with more than 5 players, then the current system would be awful for it. There would be a lot of arguments and conflict between players when the group starts to wipe and people would vote kick each other (usually based on their misunderstanding of fight mechanics). This is the example where 1 leader would truly shine as he/she would be able to control the group and prevent irrational and misinformed vote kicks, especially in large groups of 10+ players. I already see this happening all the time in smaller scale content such as fractal/arah PUGs and I would have loved to prevented my one of my Fractal 50 PUGs from kicking a ranger who didn’t deserve it after Jade Maw died and not receive his daily/chest.

Of course this all moot since I’m 90% sure that the challenging group content they add is going be open world stuff that is zergable.

I know you guys are against the gear thing so much, but there is content that actually requires gear: Fractals. If not gear, then you should atleast be able to see their AR or you shouldn’t be able to join FotM 50 groups without 70 AR (Maybe 65). I don’t actually care about seeing people’s gear otherwise.

cthaeh.2168:

Rising Dusk.2408:

Only the leader can kick people and it doesn’t require a vote kick.

This is such a terrible idea. You want to give more power to toxic players? You need to outline the problems you are trying to fix before offering solutions.

More or less the 3 main problems:
1. Having 2 people join your LFG at the end of a run and hijacking your instance (Big problem for dungeon sellers or people giving away free spots)
2. Grief vote kicking (e.g. kicking people after Jade Maw dies even though you’ve successfully carried them just to spite them)
3. Vote kicking at the end of a dungeon/boss fractal to get guildies in. (When in reality most of the people that are getting kicked are dragging the team down or being a jerk in one way or another. They’re also not inviting friends and relisting in LFG)

Although, I don’t see why people are so against 1 person leaders. The burden of being a good leader falls on one person and I think the community is nice enough for it to not get it out hand (We have one of the nicer MMO community). We already have that issue right now anyways where you can kick anyone you want whenever you want if you bring a friend, and most people start groups with friends anyways. There are more people that wouldn’t abuse that then there are who would use it to their advantage and you just need one of those people to be the leader.

Ah, didn’t expect to start a discussion so I didn’t really plan it out or think of all the corner cases :P

But yeah, there are a lot of things need to be considered and I didn’t list every possible detail. I agree the gear thing is not required, but a more convenient way to ping your gear/build (like in GW1) would be nice.

Some other considerations:
- Story requirement/Contested Dungeon may need to be redesigned
- May need automated group finder to balance the group composition (eg. 1 class/party unless you queue with a friend?)

pdavis.8031:

Hmm not bad.

However,

1. I don’t think that randomly putting people into random groups is a good idea. For those wanting a specialized group getting random pugs that don’t meet the requirements and not have the ability to kick would be horrible. I feel that forcing people together, without the option to leave would only cause rage, hate, trolling, ect.

They’ll have the ability to vote kick, just not as leniently as they can right now.’

Edit 2: I think you may have missed the point, option #1 is meant for quick grouping of people with no requirements. Not the mode you use for wanting a specialized group. E.g. you shouldn’t want to kick the 500 AP necro in this group mode (nor should you be allowed to vote kick someone in the first 1 minute of the party just cause you don’t like the group comp.) It’s meant for casual runs.

Rising Dusk.2408:

A party leader system is something that a lot of players talk about, but no one has actually defined in any appreciable way. I think I’ll probably start a discussion topic and see what it is that people would actually want from such a system.

Well, for starters GW1 had a party leader system. It wasn’t perfect and had a lot of flaws (like being unable to replace someone who rage quit/dc’d) but I’d rather have that one anyday.

Anyways here is what I would want in my dream party/lfg system:

Ideally, I think there should be options for people to get into instance groups. An automated one and a modified version of the existing LFG system

1. Automated group finder with heavy vote kick restrictions and no real “leader”. The option for new players or when you just don’t care about getting a zerker group for CoF p1 or w/e. You get a debuff that prevents you from using this option if you rage quit while the party is full. You can not initiate vote kicks in combat, or after the final boss has been killed.

2. The current LFG system modified to request party invites instead of automatically joining the group. The party leader will see a list of people who applied to join the party and can see their gear. Only the leader can accept join requests and invite other people. Only the leader can kick people and it doesn’t require a vote kick. This is the option to join if you want join a zerker meta p1 speed run or clerics only run or achievement run etc.

tl;dr: Use the same system every other good MMO uses cause it works and solves every issue we have about grief kicking.

Also on topic: Please stop thinking of that instance ownership system we had as a party leader system. They are different and people don’t actually want that back, they just want to not be unfairly kicked.

LB#3 used to apply 10 stacks of Vuln. One of the balance patches moved the vuln stacks to Rapid Fire.

That was ages ago.

Mesmer, Guardian and Warrior teams haven’t been meta for a while now. New holy trinity is Warrior, Thief and Ele with mesmer/guardian to fill in as needed on a per path basis.

Rangers can fit into speed run teams, but it depends a lot on the skill of the player. My guild hasn’t managed to get any record clear times that include a ranger (and they have been trying hard). They are more viable now than in previous builds of the game.

Ranger PvE hype!

Fluffball.8307:

Sort of. GS is still the best weapon for multiple targets. And obviously movement, but you don’t need a Twilight just to run skips.

This actually isn’t true anymore unless your sword’s OH is not axe. Towelcat did the math recently for various ranger set ups http://puu.sh/b6f2s/2cc82028fb.txt

S/A > GS for 3 target scenarios by a significant margin, S/A > GS for 5 target scenarios by a very small amount.

GS still has it’s uses outside of trash skips. It’s still useful for max melee range fights and scenarios where you don’t want to accidently leap out of a stack spot. It’s also our next best option on fights where using the sword is difficult.

I can’t really think of a situation in PvE where I found the sword to be helpful enough to be worth the problems associated with it.

I mean, I’m used to the playstyle and think the animations are cool but there is no way I can agree that the animation locks/leaps are helpful in PvE. Being able to instantaneously dodge, circle strafe and max melee range is much more helpful than being able to chase enemies in an environment where they are mostly stationary.

Try using the GS until your comfortable enough to switch over to sword. It’s not that far behind sword.

I’ve always wanted more empyreal fragments! And rings.

Purple Miku.7032:

I’ve mailed pugs food/nourishment before only for them to ignore it. I don’t understand people like this.

I’ve even put down feasts before and people ignore them and/or continue to use their peach pie or magic find food.

I was referring to the pet only, the numbers for the ranger include standard buffs.

The numbers people are posting are the sum of a near fully buffed ranger and a pet with basic boons via fortifying bond.

Tree.3916:

In a typical group setting a ranger and pet will get around 8.5k dps not counting Vuln.

For comparison’s sake using the same assumptions (25 Might, 0 Vuln, Warrior Banners, Spotter, traited FS)

thief: 13.5k
Warrior: 11k
Staff ele: 12k
Guardian: 8.5k
Necro: 9.2k
Engineer: 11.7k

Rangers are definitely in the bottom tier, if you take pet DPS out they aren’t even mentionable. The DPS you benefit your party with using FS and Spotter does mitigate your own abysmal DPS so your party breaks even. Rangers need to be buffed by about 10% to make them a “must bring” addition to parties.

I know it’s very situational, but where would you place mesmer on that list?

Durzlla.6295:

Also I wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers excluded buffing the pet…

I’m pretty sure Nike and GK are including might and fury, but not unique buffs such as banners (because pets don’t get them when your entire party is within range)

There’s no real incentive for trying out some of the more annoying instabilities. Maybe I would try them if they added an achievement similar to Dungeon Master or if there was a speciffic"daily" scale level with bonus rewards or something.

warriorjrd.8695:

All of those are on non-moving targets. The golems can’t kite the pets or throw slowing conditions on them, evade etc. The numbers for a moving target or something with a brain would be significantly different.

Theorycraft on non moving targets is still very applicable to PvE environments, since bosses generally don’t move outside of maybe a few fractal bosses.

dakotawilliams.5921:

Invigorating bond heals like 1/3 of a zerker’s health.

Assuming 837 Healing power (b/c you didn’t fill in your armor and weapons)

1900/10805= 17.5%
1900/15082= 12.6%
1900/18732= 10.1%

A bit hard to take you seriously when you make outrageous claims like this.

I feel mixing solo builds together with group builds would just confuse people.

They should really just add another category for soloing instead of grouping it together with dungeons, which does imply a 5 person environment.

The adept trait is personal preference and doesn’t make a big difference. The Master trait is usually Offhand Training (VII) and paired with OH axe.

Upon closer inspection, it would appear that they change traits on a per fight basis. Cow used Shared Anguish and Offhand training for Lupicus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkM7qYbhuU4 (this is from the PoV from someone who doens’t play a ranger and made one specifically for this one solo. Also because we picked Ranger as a guild instead of engi/necro)

I think DEKeyz mentioned somewhere 4/5/5 is the best personal dps spec (though it comes at the cost of untraited spirits). 4/5/5 is also what the rangers in my guild use to solo Arah.

But yeah, like Guang said it works fine in open world even though it was designed more for dungeons/fractals. You’ll need to adjust your build slightly, just like you do for other classes (ie. you don’t run a banner kitten build while solo-ing on a warrior)

You’ll need to tell people what you plan on doing with that build (Dungeons, sPvP, WvWvW, open world etc.) and then people can give you better advice.

Try switching the stats on your armor and trinkets. Use Zerker trinkets and cavalier/knights armor.

The way to interpret this graph is that you want one of the 2 set ups with ranger runes because the bonus is easier to maintain. If the difference between ranger runes and scholar is very small (ie. less than 4%) with 100% uptime then it means ranger runes are usually better in practical play because you won’t have 100% uptime on scholar runes.

Though, i’d prefer using knights armor because meta ranger builds typically have 100% crit chance. Also, please don’t use omnomberry bars for dungeons/fractals. Use any power or precision food. Candied Dragon Rolls/Omnomberry Ghosts seem to be appropriate for this build given the sacrifice in DPS for more survivability.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNEQNBMhFakRleVbVxnFuWDkHULDgC+dccHztzsoLuYongA-TlBVwAPV9Bw+DIU+lSfQR1AuoEkUA2oMC-w

For the record, those DPS numbers don’t mean anything without context. They’re just there to compare to the relative strength of each set up.

Eggyokeo.9705:

Fluffball.8307:

TurtleDragon.3108:

The guide on dulfy’s website is pretty decent and should probably be linked instead of mine:

Not to toot your horn (I have a wife after all) but I think your guide is a lot easier to read. Hers provides some additional info, but you simplified it to get it the point across.

what he said

though it might worth putting in a link in you op. either way what ever gets more people playing appropriate build is a good thing

Done.

Updated the guide slightly to more accurately show what other rangers are running. The main change is that I’ve removed my bias against OH axe and included it in the main build link.

In fractals, yes.

In regular dungeons, no.

Shiren.9532:

Even today you see Gaungali post in meta discussions defending the ranger with facts instead of “lol bearbow” nonsense.

You do realize he has a thread in the dungeon forum right now saying the exact opposite of this, right? It’s saying that rangers are worthless even with the meta build.

And I thought my responses were BHB enough as it is lol.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

TurtleDragon.3108:

Vox Hollow.2736:

Ah, I see.

I wanted to interject the idea this thread might be getting the posts it does, because it’s a hard topic to generate a conversation around. If composition is one of your concerns, there’s not much to say because you assimilate and move on. If composition isn’t one of your concerns, there’s not much to say because you don’t have a vested interest at all.

This is pretty much what I said and was going to say again but you said it better. I don’t exactly see it as a problem, but it would be nice to have my favourite class be one of the OP ones for a change.

Though, I do discourage the exclusion of rangers in a PUG environment (Which is the context of the original post) where min-maxing composition is no where near as important.

If you’re referring to my post I’m talking about minmaxed comps. Frostspotter is terrible in pugs since you’re losing a fixed amount of damage but boosting party DPS by a percentage, meaning that the lower the party DPS is, the harder it is to break even with the fixed personal DPS loss. Frost Spirit gives you around 700 DPS gain on a 10k meta DPS warrior ally but probably only about 140 DPS to a crappy bearbow. Meanwhile you’re still taking that 7k DPS difference between a ranger and a staff ele just by being a ranger.

Yeah, except you’re thinking of extremes where in reality most groups will hover around in the mid range spectrum of DPS. We already know Rangers are not ideal for min-max groups.

Unorganized groups don’t think in terms of numbers. You’re also severely underestimating the importance of PHIW and comfort picks in unorganized groups. Maximizing DPS is the least of people’s concerns in PUGs. They’re much more concerned about not wiping and will opt for the less yolo-y strategies.

Vox Hollow.2736:

Ah, I see.

I wanted to interject the idea this thread might be getting the posts it does, because it’s a hard topic to generate a conversation around. If composition is one of your concerns, there’s not much to say because you assimilate and move on. If composition isn’t one of your concerns, there’s not much to say because you don’t have a vested interest at all.

This is pretty much what I said and was going to say again but you said it better. I don’t exactly see it as a problem, but it would be nice to have my favourite class be one of the OP ones for a change.

Though, I do discourage the exclusion of rangers in a PUG environment (Which is the context of the original post) where min-maxing composition is no where near as important.

The guide on dulfy’s website is pretty decent and should probably be linked instead of mine:

http://dulfy.net/2014/07/05/gw2-ranger-pve-class-guide-by-lorek-and-cell/

It’s more detailed and helpful for anyone that doesn’t have a short attention span. Glad to see a decent ranger guide on a high traffic website.

I hate it when Warriors pull with throw axe or Blade Trail lol.

Ray of Judgement (Guardian Focus) is my favourite pulling skill.