Guild Wars 2

Even if you’ve got a bias to value offense over defense in a general sense, in open world PvE doesn’t where ranger’s defenses currently rest at now seem rather high when you start comparing classes directly to eachother? Regardless of spec, I mean.

I’m not sure I grab your meaning.
Do you mean “Only offense has value, so who cares how much we increase Defense”?

I don’t think anybody ever offers up these kinds of suggestions because Ranger is lacking in pet survivability options, Mister. They’re offering up suggestions to improve the baseline performance, because a pet only really panning out with heavy investment for harder content is a terribly unfair caveat.

To answer OP, massively overpowered in Open-world PvE, which they’re way too powerful for already. Whatever survivability solutions you’re considering, it has to somehow be context sensitive.

Like, say, something Nature’s Protection-esque. Anytime your pet gets hit for more than X% of it’s HP in a single strike, it receives a protection buff. That’s context sensitive defense in an obvious way. Or like, giving pets the capacity to Rally. That’s context sensitive defense in a less obvious way, insomuch that it’s more likely to get used in a dungeon or WvW situation with multiple adds everywhere, than solo’ing a champion in the open world or 1v1’ing in sPvP. I don’t think either of those really hit the mark, exactly, but something along those general lines.

my main concern is sick’em being bugged..
i use birds for burst and as soon as they use swiftness the sick’em buff gets wiped.. before it even started..

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Major-Ranger-bug-Sick-em-is-Broken/first#post1480506

You have to be in range.
Despite the name of it, which would lead you to believe the pet is the center of the AOE, it’s mechanically a standard Shout which is centered on the player.

I think that’s the worst part of thing. Dead, I can live with. Horrible rez speed, I can live with. Not making proper use of the whole ‘separate entity’ part of Ranger and centering the AOE on the player? Totally unforgivable.

It got onto my bar in PvE because of the changes to Stealth mechanics, actually.

I use my pet to manage adds alot, so I have some good uses for the Protection component. Guard was always tempting, but such a hard sell because having stealth for a nanosecond would cause the pet to drop aggro, and it would have a hard time recovering it. Now my pets appropriately snaps it back up.

The actual stated purpose of thing, to put a pet somewhere else and have it stay there, is so mind bogglingly situational. I think crystal bashing in CoF is about the only time I actually used it for that purpose. Other Utilities sorely need to synergize with it in meaningful ways in order for the relocation to actually be something worth doing.

When you’re talking about the actual data itself, you use the word ‘Metrics’. Not trying to grammar nazi on you two in particular, I’m just using the opportunity to say it to alot of people because I’ve seen that misconception floating around.

And, yeah, that was a fluffy answer. I sincerely hope he went back to the office and prodded somebody.

I think taht this interview explain how they balance the game…our word are all wasted then?

Metrics just tell you ‘what’, they don’t tell you ‘why’.
The metrics will probably say, for example, lots of people take Quickening Zephyr. Metrics can even get as detailed as saying what we use the quickness for; how often it’s used for resurrection, how often it’s used for channeled skills like barrage. But metrics don’t say why players put Quickening Zephyr on their bar in the first place.

That what forum feedback is good for, to fill in the ’why’s.
It’s just kind of a shame our discussions are so superficial and geared towards chasing our bloody tail for months on end, we rarely ever provide feedback that isn’t basically just repeating metrics.

“I don’t like my pet because it’s 40% of my damage and it dies alot!”
Yeah, they know.

I think I’d rather see #1, but make champion and veteran mobs in the open world act as better tutorials for the upcoming dungeon experience. (and adjust their rewards accordingly).

It only makes sense the hardest content in the game should be balanced for 80’s, and I think the open world experience would be better off getting some more imaginative encounters.

They buff a starter dungeon but leave cof p1 untouched I guess they like elitist zerker wars and don’t care about newer and casual players which from most games the majority of the player base.

Please tell ANet to buff COF P1 please. Isnt that the easiest dungeon and the most preferred farm despite being lvl 75?

I approve of doing this to all the dungeons.
It might take a while before they get done doing this to all of them. Scripting-wise and balance-wise this is honestly a decent chunk of work for two people, even if those two people are Mr. Hrouda and his nameless trusty sidekick.

Those discussion aren’t great, they’re terrible.
Bunch of pointless navel gazing between entrenched white knights and disillusioned GW1 malcontents that can’t quite seem to get over fact this is indeed a pet class.

It buries salient criticisms under so much unfocused bile, it distracts from real actionable solutions with suggestions that land somewhere between hopeless and crazy, and it creates a front so fractured we can’t get any traction at all on issues that aren’t even base breaking.

This discussion doesn’t need production values, it needs to stop.

I do, and I think that’s a little dramatic.

Utilities need a solid pass, Traits need a synergy overhaul, and the design team needs to use a different balance philosophy for ranger pets than they do all other minions (because that ‘specialization= surviving enough to be viable’ philosophy ends up very unfair to non-BM specs).

But good lord, it’s not like anybody’s sitting around for literally months waiting to gain a level.

You’re upset that dungeons aren’t enough like farming?
I think you are actually missing the point, OP.

Our group even tried interrupting, but with his defiance, he can’t be

It was mentioned in a previous thread that this guy is a bit bugged right now in that regard. But generally speaking, when a mob has Unshakeable, you’re supposed to use cc to strip off stacks of Defiant in order to leave it open for an interrupt. The Defiant mechanic isn’t outright cc immunity.

As far as I know word of god on the topic is that skipping Lt. Koheler in AC and the Bridge in SE are valid tactics. Which is kind of obvious, really, because there are alternate paths purposefully built into the level design that allow you to accomplish that.

As far as I know we don’t really have any word of god on instances of skipping where there aren’t really any obvious alternate paths and you’re just using the leashing mechanic. There was another quote more recently that admitted leashing needed to stay for other gameplay reasons and said either ‘rebalancing rewards would get looked into to encourage fighting instead of discouraging skipping’, or ‘rebalancing rewards would not get looked into because making sure people feel compelled to get to the end but rewarded throughout is too difficult to balance’ depending on interpretation.

So…yeah….

Whoever says skipping means no skill is only admitting that they have no skill or experience themselves.

People use the word skill where they really shouldn’t. You’re never not using a skill as a human being, it’s how we interact with the world. Writing a forum post involves skill, technically speaking. I think they’re mostly just using the word and hoping to get at something tangential, like respect, or challenge, or gameplay.

There’s no way anything is skill-less, that just doesn’t happen.

What Skipping really lacks is a solid skill-curve, and that’s only really because there just isn’t much gameplay to speak of. You don’t really create a skipping build, you don’t progress your character in the art of skipping, there isn’t enough variety or depth in the challenges mobs present to you that would cause you to explore. It’s a stagnant experience, it starts in one place and just kind of stays there the entire time, so of course your skillset wouldn’t be growing or changing as a result. As the playerbase expands it’s collective knowledge on the subject, we learn new ’where’s, but it’s always the same ‘how’.

And this is kind of unfortunate.

I haven’t played any other MMO’s (besided gw1), but a friend of mine told me that this mindset is a guild wars community thing, not found in other MMO’s to the degree that it’s found here. There were many speed runs in gw1 that were the same.

Just to clear this up, elitism of all shapes and sizes has been around in the genre for ages. In the grand scheme of things GW2 has actually done a pretty good job of avoiding class-based discrepancies, and class-based elitism is certainly present but ridiculously tame (comparatively).

I think your friend is talking more about the speedrunning causing elitism. I had never even heard a speedrun before coming to this game, and I remember typing N to go North.

You want people to play like you so that your runs go better and that you can improve your time invested/reward ratio.

I sincerely do not care about profit/hr. I constantly mention my preference for fighting trash mobs during skipping debates in the dungeon forum, despite the terrible risk/reward ratio.

No sinister wordplay here.
It really is just about teamwork.

You misunderstand me, Leo.

I’m not saying ’I’m not keeping track of your contribution’ in the sense that I’m not being vigilant.

I mean it in the sense that the other people in a group are teammates, not NPCs doling out gold medallions of participation. It’s not possible to somehow ‘win’ alt-swapping from your teammates. people feel very strongly about this one way or the other, and progress in a dungeon has no bearing on that.

It’s not a binary indiscretion. People do genuinely seem more upset proportional to the more magic find you stack. I think if people seem more upset with the word ‘Armor set’ it’s because it refers to multiple pieces, while the word ‘Food’ just refers to one.

That’s not to imply there’s a threshold for happiness that your magic find can land under, just a threshold of unhappiness it can go over before people start pursuing the matter verbally.

Yeah, like I said earlier. It comes down to people getting upset because they feel they’re entitled to some imaginary run that COULD have gone a few minutes faster if their party members had done X thing differently. And there are a huge number of things that X could be, but for some reason only MF gear gets people upset enough to start throwing out insults.

I’m afraid you’ve mistaken me.

I’m saying people aren’t angry because you’re inefficient, they’re angry that you’re not giving the group your all. It’s not a numbers problem, it’s an attitude problem that just happens to involve numbers.

Except for the post I made previously where I explained that Explorer’s is only “worse” than going full glass cannon. You can dodge the point all you want, if you’re going to say someone isn’t contributing enough by using Explorer’s then anyone who uses Knights isn’t contributing enough either.

I don’t know about other people, but, I don’t consider damage the only way a player can be valuable to the group. I don’t hold a tanky/support character by the same standards I do glass cannon characters because I expect them to be doing different things. For example; I don’t expect a tanky/support character to strategically burst down an add, and I don’t expect a glass cannon to dive into a fire to rez somebody.

I think it’s just easier to talk about it from a glass cannon versus MF perspective, because the difference can be quantified in easy to compare numbers.

That said, I don’t think it’s about the specifics of the comparison per se’, the comparison just highlights the existence of a discrepancy at all. There’s unspoken rule in the social contract of grouping, that you should always try your best for the sake of your group. It doesn’t matter what your best actually boils down to in practical terms, just that you’re trying. I think when (most) people are talking about Magic Find being selfish, I don’t think they’re really hung up on exact percentages of efficiency, but that you’re volunteering not to put forth your best effort in exchange for personal gain.

I’m not running an invisible tally of your contribution, and you can’t reach a point where you’ve “done enough”. I’m your teammate, not a bloody Event NPC.

Try to understand.

If you’re opposed to being used this way, and somebody just wordlessly slides in with their level 5 leech on the boss fight, what are your options exactly? I think opening up a dialogue about it and/or requesting a kick are your ultimate goals, but when you break the process of that down step-by-step the realities of what this entails exactly starts to creep in.

People aren’t always looking up at the party member UI and the combat log. It might take a bit to explain what’s happening to somebody whose never seen it before. People might prefer to ‘go with the group’ which involves them waiting for other inputs. It’s not like there’s a Pause button, and even if you do call for a Timeout, that’s no guarantee anybody’s going to hear you. And while you’re working out how to start getting across your communications and giving people time to respond, do you still keep fighting?

On a practical level this is kind of difficult, it’s hard as heck to type and do any appreciable level of action at the same time. On an emotive level, you’re between a rock and a hard place. The very principals that cause you to be upset with the practice encourages you to contribute to it happening. The choice between situational hippocracy and letting people walk all over you is bad enough, but to have to actually actively work towards abusing yourself is downright twisted.

So somebody would rather be a hippocrit than a doormat.
Honestly, I can’t blame them. Although I try my best to make my intentions clear beforehand, I’ve come across enough snakes in the grass to be hitting my breaking point too. I’m still trying to figure out how I want to handle it exactly.

Just because we have a natural impulse to do something, doesn’t make it right. There are alot of very bad things that could be rightly called an optimization of effort. We’d be in a pretty horrible state is anything was okay as long as it was efficient.

You think the banks didn’t get punished because what they did was easy therefore they weren’t guilty of anything? I sincerely don’t know what to say to that.

If your not interested in talking about the thing I’m talking about, there wasn’t much of a point in responding to me at all.

They certainly need to resolve whatever conflict is happening between their QA team and the programmers because bugs keep happening every~ patch.
It’s the nature of most natural things to take the path of least resistance.
The rest of your appeal to ridicule not withstanding.

Path of Least Resistance is an Explanation, not an Excuse.
It explains why nature and humans optimize their actions, it’s not meant to be used as a shield you throw up whenever you want to cheat your face off. How easy or difficult something is has no relationship to it’s morality, nor your responsibility for doing it.

As a customer you can certainly be dissatisfied with the quality of their QA team if you really want to. But this also has no bearing on the morality and responsibility of your actions.

It’s the developer’s fault for not making a perfect bug free product!
It’s human nature to cheat, I can’t help being human!
It’s other player’s fault for not calling me out!

I’m not responsible for the bad things I do!

:) happy to help

Hm. I do know that if you use Sic ‘Em while out of combat your pet will sort of get to mid-range and then sit there and contemplate it’s navel for a second before getting down to business. Though, If you do it while in combat, you won’t have the same effect. Thankfully.

Is that what you’re talking about, or is the damage buff dropping?

/edit: I guess while we’re on this topic I may as well contribute this horrible little nugget just as a general PSA. Last I checked, this pause actually made closing the distance to the target slower than a pet just running naturally. Panned out to something like this;

Natural run to 1200 range target
4s761ms, 4s790ms, 4s730ms (4.7 average)

Agility Training run to 1200 range target
4s171ms, 4s047ms,4s098ms (4.1 average)

Signet of the Hunt run to 1200 range target
4s247ms, 4s202ms, 4s147ms (4.2 average)

Sic ‘Em run to 1200 range target
out of combat; 5s016ms,4s952ms,5s046ms (5.0 average)
in combat; 3s875ms, 3s850ms, 3s978ms (3.9 average)

A safety net for what?

Safety net in the sense that the only thing worse than having potentially troublesome mechanics, is having potentially troublesome mechanics that are only available to a select number of classes.

The last I checked it the AOE radius for Search and Rescue was centered on the Player and not the Pet, even when under the effect of the “Guard” shout. I can check again in a bit.

Which is a super bummer. What’s the point in having your pet anchor themselves at a location, if that new anchor point has no meaningful synergy with other skills?

/edit: Yup, the AOE is centered on the Player, even while under the effect of “Guard”.

The only one who defines an exploit is Anet.

But generally speaking you naturally understand more about the distinction than you think you do, just try not to let your closeness to the subjectmatter cause you to second guess yourself.

What’s helped me avoid losing sight of the forest is judging my actions based on how they’d be perceived by an outsider looking in. I’d ask myself something painfully objective, like; “If I were to fraps this, would I put it in a multi-milliondollar TV spot advertising the game?”. Chances are if it makes the masses think GW2 is a crappy game, it’s not exactly kosher.

Re; Spykits/Portal Guns
I’m (mostly) sure those are around to act as a safety net. The problem with those items isn’t that they exist, they’re just representatives of some of the more potentially exploitable mechanics already present on players. Getting rid of Spy Kits doesn’t get rid of Stealth. What it gets rid of is the ability for anyone to have access to it. Imagine how problematic the alternative could be.

The only real PvP experience I have is sPvP, and the only advice I can offer is if your enemy is using a melee weapon.

Given how much of our defense is mobility based, it’s really easy to fall into the habit of letting the other player ‘lead’ and end up bouncing all around the playing-field with your pet trailing behind. So, what I’ve found that helps a pet to land attacks is….well, frankly a notion that’s pseudo-suicidal and completely counterintuitive.

Stay still on purpose.

I’m not saying try and approach fights by straight tanking, or eating a 100 blades to face to land your F2, or that flanking or getting behind somebody is off the table. But I am saying you can’t dodge and outrun everything, so I’ve found it’s better to get hit on your own terms and make those moments work towards a greater goal, than falling into a pattern of reaction and being unable to maneuver your pet into a favorable position because of it. Speccing BM comes hand in hand with some defensive benefits for the player, use that to help you survive pausing the motion of combat in controlled intervals that you coordinate with your pet’s offensive bursts.

That’s a bit too blanket.
There are indeed obvious places built into the level design that allows for avoiding aggro entirely, and I do think those specific places are meant to be optionally skippable. But to take that as an indication that any and every instance of skipping was intended? I think that’s a bit much.

I kinda’ think if game developers had a hand in it, there would more actual game to this practice. (like Skyrim). There’s some core things missing here that are pretty important to RPGs; meaningful mob variety, progression, and character building* to name a few.

There’s also alot of value to leashing that has nothing to do with skipping (allows you to retreat and revise your approach to a fight without dying, just for starters). My ultimate desire for dungeon tweaks is that it tapers both extremes of our behavior and makes a more unified dungeon experience for the playerbase as a whole, but despite removing leashing being far and away the easiest method of accomplishing that, even I’m kind of reluctant to axe it. It’s genuinely good stuff.

*(Because of combat slowdown, the 3 S’s are OP to the point of overshadowing other options. Because these exist on utility skills mostly, you don’t have to actually build a skipping character. So there isn’t much build variety or any kind of meta to speak of.)

Nowadays I don’t join or start a run without spelling out what my expectations are. So, for me, there is no unspoken default.

Because of that, outside of forums, I haven’t much had your issue.
But, if the forums are any indication, it’s not any one side that’s oppressing the other, both sides are spewing horrible bile eachother. Skippers get painted as selfish lazy exploiters, non-skippers get painted uncoordinated newbie nolifers. Both of those perspectives are a crock of bull, and the reason you’re hearing any of it at all has got more to do with the tension this unfortunate split creates than any real sentiments to you or your performance.

I am talking about in combat.
I can have both selected in my traits list and still only get 125 in combat. Something somewhere bugs the connection between the two.

Compassion Training does affect Natural Healing.
However, there’s a bit of bug in there somewhere that’ll keep Compassion Training from applying. I’m not really sure what’s going on exactly. But I just go back in, select junk traits in all three slots, and then make sure to assign Compassion Training before assigning Natural Healing and that tends to fix things up.

I kinda’ agree with Serraphin. This game has an awful lot of AOE between the ground targets and the cleaving attacks, much more than your average MMORPG. I’m not sure if the standard solution is necessarily the best solution.

I think the issue is rooted in the design philosophy of Ally NPCs in general. Traiting Ally NPCs is more about making them survive long enough to be viable at all, than providing additional functionality or new gameplay. That really puts a damper on builds that want to use one of these utilities without specializing completely, and non-BM Rangers in particular are all sorts of screwed.

I don’t know if there is any simple neat and tidy way to resolve that. Seems like the stuff of massive overhaul.

Pets are basically wandering DoT immobilizes that last as long as their HP does, when you really boil them down. So any time where you’d want to keep something or multiple somethings away from you or your allies is a time where you don’t want to swap.

Admittedly, unless you’re speccing beastmaster this option is off the table completely in dungeons. Which is kind of tragic, considering how fundamental this function is to how pet classes operate.

Much like other posters, I also usually snag 2 Tier1 traits.

I’m using Compassion Training, Shout Training, and Natural Healing right now, as I’ve been taking Search and Rescue lately to help with the recent waypoint dungeon change.

But Master’s Bond is another goodie that gets underestimated alot. Most people are put off by the stack wiping on death, but in practice it’s easier than it seems, because the more stacks you have the easier it is to keep stacks.

@ Auesis
My comments do not apply in that situation, as I’ve painstakingly pointed out in the first page of this thread I am not interested in discussing powerlevelling. In case it wasn’t clear, I’m speaking specifically of the act of ninja leeching in pug settings. You can think my scorn for ninja leeching is pretentious if you want, all I can say is “I’m sorry you feel that way, but I don’t have any intentions of changing my opinion on that.”

@ ComeandSee

It’s unreasonable to expect other people to act as your moral compass.

During the fact, your attempts at consideration end up making immediate reaction difficult on a practical level. If they even know this is possible in the first place, it’s unreasonable to expect your teammates take their attention off playing to monitor you.

Even if you were caught after the fact, People aren’t going to naturally assume you’ve put the responsibility for your behavior in their hands. Why would they? It’s much more rational to assume somebody does something rude to be rude, not because they just don’t know any better. That’s like expecting somebody to say ‘flipping people off is rude’ everytime somebody gives them the bird on the offchance somebody didn’t know it was. They have no reason to believe you were looking for somebody to correct your behavior, and they have no responsibility to be the one to do it.

But at the end of the day. If you honestly believe nobody cares – then you honestly believe you have nothing to lose by asking. So why don’t you just Ask from now on?

@ ComeandSee

Oh. I just didn’t believe you’d meant it the way it sounded.

God forbid we don’t have at least 2 people watching the party menu like a hawk at all times, least somebody get the idea kicking back in a lawnchair and sipping a martini while other people are working unawares is not only acceptable but encouraged.

You know, doing a bad thing is still a bad thing, even if you don’t get caught.

@ ComeandSee
Without mentioning the asking part in your process explaination, your post probably isn’t reading quite how you expected it to.

Kinda’ thinking less debatey more commiserating rabble rabble. So it doesn’t much matter to me there isn’t much of an opposing viewpoint.

If the complaint is people doing it at all, then I have to disagree. The player is still putting in the effort of getting to that point. And if their team is all right with it, then no harm done. Right?

When you put aside the ninja mooching,
what you’re left with is a pretty standard powerlevelling discussion. You know; Yadda yadda ‘Pointless Grind’ yadda yadda ‘Level 80 Noobs’ yadda yadda link to Extra Credits video which is somehow perfectly relevant. One of those friggin’ things.

I kind of think the Leeching aspect of this is genuinely bad enough that it deserves it’s own serious thread. So can we sort of ignore the Powerlevelling part of it, or at least get it in another thread?

/edit: Niceness pass.
What can I say? Mooching kittens rustle my jimmies.

The word Exploit encompasses this practice so fully it actually manages to satisfy more than one sense of it. It’s both exploitative of mechanics in the game design sense, and can easily be exploitative of your teammates in the common usage sense. It is both An Exploit and Exploitative.

I seriously can’t imagine a word that more accurately describes the situation.

Levels exist, therefore, it’s okay to work the system to undermine the spirit of them?

That’s quite the twisted logic. “But, Officer, I wouldn’t be guilty of breaking and entering if they didn’t put that diamond behind so much bulletproof glass”?

I think hoping people will restrict the applications of an exploit with common courtesy in mind might be a touch overly optimistic.

Also, you can’t mistake somebody not taking the time to call you out on something as being okay with it. “It was more trouble for them to stop/replace me, than to carry me” is not exactly the kind of logic that gets you on somebody’s friends list.

I suspect the only reason why it’s allowed is because the devs haven’t figured out how to code against it.

That’s kind of my feelings on it.
Prettymuch any countermeasure I can figure would be limiting people. I think this is one of those instances where it’s better to encourage people to stick with one character throughout, than try to figure out a way to block this and hope you chose something with the least backlash to legitimate play.

You know, revamping the magic find mechanic could potentially two birds one stone both the trash mobs reward structure issue and this irritating practice.

If you got increasingly better rewards the more you fought, this bonus had no limits to what it applied to, and it was something that stacked on your character; you would naturally make changing your character at the end a sacrifice of loot in exchange for powerlevelling your alt.

I’d love to see metrics of how much of the time during combat in a dungeon that a pet is cowering (I’d also love to see it broken down by pet types) across all rangers.

It’s not just Ranger pets, it’s Ally NPCs fullstop.

Nearly all of them have a fragile baseline that can be made to help survive a dungeon setting through full specialization. Ally NPC specialization equalling dungeon viability instead of additional utility makes survivability everyone’s problem. But Non-BM Rangers in particular do end up all sorts of thoroughly boned.