Guild Wars 2

it’s hard to create a scoring system which could truly analyze a person’s effectiveness. And it’s used by players to get a sense of how long they’ve been playing, th thinking being that time and skill to have something of a positive correlation. However once you’re over rank 30 it doesn’t mean much, titles such as champion slayer are probs better indicators of skill, but again not great.

WhiteAndMilky.2514:

Thread about math with no math in it. Nothing to see here?

sigh “You totally missed the point of the thread: you can’t apply such math to pvp because you can’t count on how many attacks will land!”

instead of saying “nothing to see” (nice contribution by the way, you’re a credit to the ranger forums) you could have actually read the thread and you wouldn’t have made this mistake…

Arekai.5698:

naphack.9346:

They now need to rebalance quite a bit of skills around the new quickness values, ESPECIALLY for ranger.

Hahaha
Haha
Ha

Hahahaha

Implying they will ever buff ranger in any form. They are so kitten lazy they will just leave it as it is. You can bet your money on it.
No time to rebalance things, better get those ranger nerfs going for the next patch, this time, it will be trapper.

GS got a nice buff, it’s not all bad news.

i agree it need to be fixed, when i use a sword i have to turn off auto-attack, but that lowers your dps as you can’t be constantly mashing 1 through a fight, or maybe you can but it’s no fun.

You could look at old junk in your pvp locker that would have required free tickets and salvage it?

what is the nature of the bug? i think i’ve done my pvp monthly already if that matters. Spent the last couple of days in hotjoin testing builds since quickness nerf, i hope i didn’t miss out on something!

capuchinseven.8395:

Wanderer.5471:

capuchinseven.8395:

OOOOHmg. These threads.

Nothing about the patch has effected my ability to kill with my power/precision build. In fact I’m dropping thieves even fast than I was before.

that’s because thieves got nerfed too, you might as well post that you seem more powerful vs warriors XD

try seeing how you do vs eles or mesmers now, we need quickness to take down these classes.

As for the 100+ gold, i feel bad for ya, it makes me appreciate PvP – i can just respec, i’d say try to make it work if that fails put ur gear in the bank for a few months, maybe things will change? in the meantime…. PvP?

Woooooosh. That’s the point going over your head as you sit in a box ignoring all the changes to the game just so you can focus on one change to justify your moaning.

I also I have no problem fighting Elementals with permanent vigor. Only problem I’d ever have with an Elemental is catching one that cheesed it when he noticed mashing his head on the keyboard wasn’t working with me.

Your point was that the patch hasn’t effected your ability to kill, I haven’t missed your point, i’m saying that you’re wrong, quickness nerf makes it much harder to kill – why do you think they nerfed it if it has no impact????

The funny thing is you even admitted yourself you can’t stop eles running – almost no class can, especially now we have less burst.

naphack.9346:

Cutting it back to 50% was fine. The problem is, they made a superficial job of it and didn’t look at it enough. They now need to rebalance quite a bit of skills around the new quickness values, ESPECIALLY for ranger.

I agree, they didn’t even change quickness traits for crying out loud – this matters even more for other classes where they are higher up the trait trees.

Prysin.8542:

However in PVP, save the Rapid Fire till your oponent is downed/immobilized. it will, and never did perform at an efficient level when the enemy was moving. Take that from someone who has spendt 100+ hours in WvW with a longbow and QZ/petswap.

It’s true, i think CC is something rangers are gonna have to use more now to get safer landed hits without quickness.

@ Minibiskit yeah you’re totally right of course, just wasn’t thinking

jubskie.3152:

I don’t see any math. All I see are insults to NPCs, and anecdotes about PvP.

You totally missed the point of the thread: you can’t apply such math to pvp because you can’t count on how many attacks will land!

However you can make estimations, i’m sorry for assuming that you could work out that 7/10 attacks no longer landing during quickness = 70% , but no i can’t work out how much dps lost that is because it depends what weapons you’re using with what stats, which attacks missed etc etc etc. Get the point? However it is clear (to some) that it is a significant reduction in damage.

naphack.9346:

want me to create a thread named “the real real math of the quickness change” now?

Anet should really lower some attack animation times on ranger.
But quickness is fine. 100% was bs.

I would read that thread! I agree they should lower the animation times on ranger weapons, i think they used to be fine because of the way quickness was and how often we got it but now they are far too slow.

I’m not sure if the quickness nerf was a good thing or not for balance, maybe we were OP before, but it is a huge nerf and i wanted to make that clear. Furthermore it kills build diversity at the top end of tpvp because soon no team will want you to run anything other than trap ranger.

capuchinseven.8395:

OOOOHmg. These threads.

Nothing about the patch has effected my ability to kill with my power/precision build. In fact I’m dropping thieves even fast than I was before.

that’s because thieves got nerfed too, you might as well post that you seem more powerful vs warriors XD

try seeing how you do vs eles or mesmers now, we need quickness to take down these classes.

As for the 100+ gold, i feel bad for ya, it makes me appreciate PvP – i can just respec, i’d say try to make it work if that fails put ur gear in the bank for a few months, maybe things will change? in the meantime…. PvP?

this thread scared me, you trollin?

danikaix.4670:

Dont forget jaguar’s maul was nerfed, add it to your list

I did read the jaguar nerf thread, but thought i’d hold off on commenting because i’m still doing my own testing – though it sounds bad.

Silverkung.9127:

I still play any build on ranger.
This time I got BM and it pay me good why u guys say it dead?

QZ feel nerf but am not think same way we all class got same50% but QZ breakstun is veryuseful more on skill slot.

The thing that makes BM in it’s past form dead was the pet cooldowns, i included quickness stuff in my post because i ran a hybrid, quickness nerf affects player more than pet.

Furthermore I’m not saying it’s now useless, I’m saying it now doesn’t come close to trap ranger’s abilities in PvP so it is effectively dead.

Quickness doesn’t reduce DPS during quickness by the amount it reduces speed, and doesn’t reduce overall DPS by finding out how often you have quickness up.

This logic assumes every shot is a guaranteed hit. Maybe that is the correct math to use for PvE logic, in PvP it really isn’t. So many people seem unable to grasp this concept I thought it was deserving of it’s own thread.

The quickness nerf hits so hard in PvP because it means animations are much slower and are therefore much more easily blocked or evaded. If you’re using 10 attacks, hitting a dumb PvE mob 50% slower with quickness, that’s 50% less DPS during quickness, 6% less overall or whatever it was worked out to be for most people.

In PvP if 7 of those 10 attacks are blocked, evaded or otherwise negated (anyone who plays PvP well knows this is totally reasonable to assume) then your DPS is massively lowered both during quickness, and overall as you’ve burned your high-damage skills/condition-stacking skills during quickness like any good player would, and have to wait for their CDs so you’re basically just auto-attacking most of the time, with probably one more skill rotation until zephyr’s speed is up again.

As any good PvP player will tell you, this decimates the effectiveness of any build that relies on ranger weapon skills for a main source of damage – berserker builds, condition builds, hybrids etc. I am not commenting on whether this was good for balance or not, but it was a huge nerf to rangers (and others – let’s have a moment of silence for warriors) in PvP.

i never used QZ either, i used zephyr’s speed

Joey.3928:

Skill comes into play more. I have beaten trap rangers 1v1 when I wanted to steal their capture point they were bunkered at. Maybe they weren’t that good with their build. Same thing goes for bm builds. There are rangers out there who are good with them

i’m sure a warrior could kill a bad trap ranger – i’m talking about where skill is equal, the only scenario worth talking about…

Joey.3928:

They are viable. I still play mine the same. It is going to be difficult to get used to pet skills not recharging on swap as well as quickness just feels so slow now. However, I think these were fair changes. Gotta adapt.

they don’t compare to trap rangers anymore, therefore they aren’t viable. Why would anyone want you to run BM in a team when traps are so much better 1v1 and in groups…

I’m not saying you can’t run one, i’m saying you can’t make them as effective as trappers hence they are pointless.

i feel your pain, I play a hybrid BM ranger, and my build was hit hard too, it’s no longer viable in tpvp/duels. It’s like Anet want us to all roll trap rangers.

very accurate post, great to see the actual numbers. I would like to add that lowered quickness speed by 50% lowers our dps during quickness by a lot more, as crucially it is much harder to land skill now than before.

Many ranger skills have long animations and are difficult to land, they were balanced this way as with quickness you would get more reliable lands every 20 seconds, this is no longer the case.

I duel a lot. I duel with many of the same people who consistently use the same builds. I use a greatsword with my BM build.

Pre-patch people/builds i would consistently beat – specifically 2 mesmer players, i can no longer even get close to beating them, despite the fact GS is buffed.

2 man reasons for this:

1. Pets are far less effective. In my case they do far less damage as i run jaguar and lynx – the cooldowns of their active skills effectively increased by 50%

2. Quickness hurts our dps soooo much. Not only do we have more quickness than any other class, but the way our skills work mean i could previously only reliably land them with quickness, but that didn’t matter too much as i got quickness every 20 seconds they would land reliably 30-50% of the time, for the rest of the time it was hit and miss.

Examples:

Axe 2 – big damage if you can land it close range, but a long, obvious animation as well as the fact you have to get right on top of the enemy means good players will almost always dodge.

Entangle – you couldn’t have a more obvious animation, without quickness, the only way to land it is to first burn another form of CC.

Maul – again, so obvious and the only sword skill which actually does damage in a condition spec, now too easy to avoid.

In closing, it’s not -50% dps for the duration quickness is up, it means skills don’t even land reliably so the true effect is far more significant. These skills were designed to be hard to land, as they were balanced around us getting more reliable lands every 20 seconds.

What this means in short is that trap ranger is now the only viable build to 1v1 with, and it was already the best, now trying anything else is just a joke. 1v1 is also very important in tpvp and i’m already noticing it, don’t think i can perform my old role of holding close point anymore. Before 95% of the time i would hold it in 1v1 against roamers, today it’s 60/40.

Maybe i shouldn’t have been able to win 95% of duels pre-patch and the nerf was necessary, i’m not commenting on that, all i’m saying is this hit BM rangers ridiculously hard, they’re no longer viable….

No – because it doesn’t effect every class, and the ones it does effect aren’t even effected to the same degree.

Ranger has perhaps been effected the most by this nerf – there is a post in the ranger forum that breaks down the amount of time any profession can have quickness up for and rangers is the highest.

I can confirm that it has severely weakened us – i regularly duel the same people, people running the same builds that i could beat 100% or 50/50 last week i now can barely damage.

It makes a massive difference because we time all out skills to make the most of quickness. With nerfed Quickness they simply don’t land anymore, they are too easily avoided.

i like it – makes titles matter more, gives players a better reason to work towards bragging rights, i just wish more titles were skill-based rather than grind-based.

Archaon.6245:

kaplis.7195:

Should this be acceptable? Especially when the ranger can build super tanky and remove all the risk that glass cannons should have.

Pets going backstab now? Can we please drop our glass thief a take a pet instead? It deals same dmg, survives more and can get stealthed ppl…oh, and we don’t need to revive him every 30 secs…you just aim and forget…accordingly with ranger’s high skill cap..

1. this is 1 ability on a 20 second CD, compared to the plethora of skills thieves have which do as much dmg
2. of course thieves are far more durable even with 30 in BM
3. Birds can’t stealth, one cat can for around 10% of the time, but can’t do such high bursts.
4. oh and a thief can’t be countered by running in a circle or casually dodging ~ every 5 seconds. I could go on…

title says it all

the map kikced us to the mists

we logged our chars to get back in to find the game we were winning replaced by the enemy having triple capped the map and all 5 sitting outside our spawn – such bs half our party just quit after that match – gamebreaking but also makes the ppl not want to play, we want our rewards for that game we rightly won, that ain’t gonna happen.

i knwo some ppl aren’t gonna pvp again ‘til it’s fixed

it’s downloading now… didn’t change anything so can’t advise any1 having the same issue except wait a while

In the PvP lobby when i look for hotjoin games all the servers appear empty and when i click play now i get hte msg that the game has been updated and to restart etc – but when i do my client doesn’t recognise there is an update available, it just logs me in…

Arken.3725:

2k armor doesn’t equal light nor does 3k equal heavy. Look at the base armor stats for each class. Light is 1836 with heavy being 2127. Again, there’s no real difference in damage taken.

i’m not talking about the base differences between type of armour – i meant builds that are considered light have 2k, med 2.5k, heavy 3k. Crossed wires, sorry.

kaplis.7195:

So all of you do think it’s ok to have 3k armor while dealing 8,5k damage…..
I don’t think it’s fine, nevermind the “difficulty” of the damage.

guardians can do just as much dps with 3k armour just not in 1 hit, warriors can do higher in 1 hit as well as higher dps with 3k armour. Other classes might not have the same armour and damage but have other ways to survive whilst doing the same or greater dps – stealth/deathshroud etc

Arken.3725:

I’m just going to put this out there, the difference between light and heavy armor is about 5% damage reduction to standard attacks(non-condition). So when someone says you have an advantage because of your armor, you can pretty much call it bs.

sorry but this is wrong, 2k armour = light, 3k = heavy – if you just play the game/test it by have a thief attack you with each set-up instead of relying on theorycrafting from whatever wrong information source you’re using then you’ll see that the thief will do around double the dps…

yes he should be able to do this because:

1. you must have had low-med armour
2. It’s the highest dmg skill he has and other professions have much higer.
3. It requires a lot of “set up” to do this sort of damage – he either needed to stack like ~20 might, or use signet of the hunt active/gs5 timing perfectly with sick-em utility
4. Though he can be reasonably tanky, he can’t be full tank and still do this damage, he needs to devote utility to pet dmg, he needs to devote traits to pet dmg
5. Birds have the most obviously telegraphed attacks, if you learn to watch for them you’ll start hoping a ranger brings them as they are so easy to avoid.
6. Birds are all about big burst damage, no sustained dps – that means if you do dodge or block etc that 1 attack then he’s basically doing next to no damage to you for the next 20 seconds

Edit: i think i just worked out what happened from the screenshot – he probably popped his Elite skill to do this – Rampage as One, then warhorn 5 – stacked 17 might on his pet – this could have been avoided if you knew how this mechanic worked, and dodged some of the warhorn attack – literally every hit landed on you.

Next time you will know to look out for this – the damage itself may not seem worth evading/blocking but each small hit in fast attack skills will give the pet a stack of might – another to look out for is LB2 or SB auto-attack especially with quickness.

some variation on the trapper is probably ur best bet- survivable enough to last a little while against 3 and all his main dmg is aoe

Taym.8326:

Wanderer.5471:

right on everything except the walking out part – this is a myth, probably came about because people with passive condition wipe don’t realise what happened.

Incorrect, if you evade or block a pulse you can walk out until the ability pulses again. Since it is a 1.5s pule it is a fairly noticeable time.

i meant that there is no point in the animation at which you can simply walk out (as someone was claiming – see quote at bottom) – you have to do something such as invuln or evade as you suggested.

I was then saying it can “appear” that you’re simply walking out without mitigating the imob with evades etc because of passive condition wipes for example empathetic bond

Luriyu.6873:

every time the bramble begins it’s next attack (visually it lowers) if they can invuln, or evade, or walk out at the right time they become free of the vines. this is possible by all classes

Arpheus.6918:

-65% condition duration and you can just walk out of it if the ranger using entangle doesn’t have lots of + condution duration.
Happened to me alot of times while I was running around with -65% condition duration. Entangle simply didnt work against me. It kept me like 0.3 sek and then I walked out. After 1 sec I think it would again try to entangle me if I was close to the roots but that wouldn’t keep me in them.
Bad design in my opinion. It should rather immob for 3-4 sec and not reapply. That way condition duration modifiers would not make it completely useless.

hmmm i never considered this as it’s less of an issue in pvp, but i know you can still get some -condition duration and hence walk out – interesting point about countering with + condition duration too.

As for the animation + dodging, it depends what race you play – as a norn, my animation is sooooo obvious, ppl always recognize it, literally 100% of the time if the other player is a ranger. But this forced me to adapt – now i almost exclusively use it during wolf fear or with quickness, good luck dodging that

Chopps.5047:

By the way, Entangle appears to successfully counter mist form escapes. Try that next time you fight an elementalist. They might stop their shenanigans when they realize they can’t mistform back into the keep. If anyone can confirm this, that would be great, since I’ve only done it a couple times and in large battles. But it seems to work…

in my experience it seems that the immob already on them still works but new ones can’t be applied as they are trapped for a second or two then float out.

zone.1073:

leman.7682:

This thread is a troll.

Really? Okay.

Ask yourself this. What beats a Ranger in downed state? Say a Guardian and a Ranger both get downed at the same time. Who will win?

warrior trumps it every time, if you played a ranger you’d know, until you do, don’t comment. 1v1 both downed, warrior gets venganced way before you’re up and stomps you

Luriyu.6873:

every time the bramble begins it’s next attack (visually it lowers) if they can invuln, or evade, or walk out at the right time they become free of the vines. this is possible by all classes

the key is to make them walk back into the vines so they are rooted again.

right on everything except the walking out part – this is a myth, probably came about because people with passive condition wipe don’t realise what happened.

Kneru.8014:

Wanderer.5471:

Razor.6392:

I love when people try to use common sense in games, like the guy above.

That’s like saying that necros shouldn’t be able to bleed inquest golems because they’re robots.

broken mechanics are broken, no pet or npc should keep agro on a stealthed target.

Yes, common sense is the enemy here. As i said, the larger issue is that it was broken before - for rangers etc to have so much dmg potential for which they have to rely on dumb AIs which can’t compete with classes where players can direct 100% of their dmg potential. It just so happens that what makes sense for balance also makes sense period.

So, what you’re saying is it’s broken

No, what i’m saying is it was broken BEFORE. Now it’s working in a way that makes sense for both balance and logic – i.e. if you come out of stealth and an AI can see you, it will attack you. Please read carefully.

So true, if you’re unlucky you can spend 5 minutes just trying to get a game, in this day and age that means people will just do something else.

But hey, you can always just press “play now” – oh wait, this way you have to load into then leave a map 3 times before you find a non-dueling server, and that’s if it doesn’t send you back to that same first dueling server a couple of times…

renegade.4851:

I’d like to, what is your ig-name?
I got time 7 hours from now (when this post was posted)

missed ur response sorry, assumed you could whisper with my screen name. Character name is Bjorn Hograkk

you can message me if you want, i;m always testing out new ranger builds

Razor.6392:

I love when people try to use common sense in games, like the guy above.

That’s like saying that necros shouldn’t be able to bleed inquest golems because they’re robots.

broken mechanics are broken, no pet or npc should keep agro on a stealthed target.

Yes, common sense is the enemy here. As i said, the larger issue is that it was broken before – for rangers etc to have so much dmg potential for which they have to rely on dumb AIs which can’t compete with classes where players can direct 100% of their dmg potential. It just so happens that what makes sense for balance also makes sense period.

You’re complaining because pets act like they would in real life and go after the prey once they can see it again??

Stealth is supposed to make it so that enemies can’t see or target you whilst it’s active. That’s what it does now. It’s the most powerful ability in the game. It was already fixed, you just preferred the broken version….

i think right now pet damage is balanced around the fact that they miss often, so if they made them stick to the target they would have to drop their damage, so it makes no real difference imho.

In fact, this way rewards good players who can increase the chances their pet will land a hit.

Some handsome SoB already reported this: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/No-pet-swap-CD-infinite-buff-stacking/first#post1548812

For my own part i hope it gets nerfed because trap rangers probs benefit the most and they’re already the strongest build we have.

KensaiZen.3740:

SoS when traited is a game winner. 6 whole seconds of invulnerability is just Win.

unfortunately it doesn’t give invulnerability, it only mitigates direct damage – going against classes which are condition specced it’s useless

if it didn’t stack with signet then it sounds good/

@kensaizen i didn’t realise there was an innate speed increase when carrying a melee weapon – i know warriors can trait to have it.

I was in a match running 3 before and someone made some snide remark about it being the laziest option.

This perception is the reason for the stigma – i.e. it’s easy mode, for people who don’t want to/can’t use too many skills.

The reality is just the opposite – with normal skills you have to manage cooldowns. With signets you have to manage cooldowns and make strategic decisions about when to sacrifice passive effects. In other words there is more complexity in signet play (Exception is people who never use actives or eles who don’t lose passive effects when traited).

Rangers are already the best orb carriers – this would make them a bit too good imho.

I know the standard trapper build, but i’m not a fan of the playstyle, i’ve also created a few random builds that can be very competitive but i’m always looking for the next, better build.

So I’ve been trying out a BM build recently, seems very strong (only hotjoin experience though). just curious what the “industry standard” is.

Because it’s the only way to survive against high-damage classes, the only classes that don’t have to go bunker are thieves and mesmers because they have stealth, Everyone else needs a way to survive or they’re a dead-weight for their team.

i wish pet casts were more responsive, and worked when moving etc, but i’m guessing long cast times on the other hand are for balance – i know that even with a 0.5 second swap on cooldown out of combat, you can’t get more than 10 stacks of might (2x casts of 5) from mighty roar because of the long cast time. Maybe that’s why… they don’t all share the same activation time after all. That said i do think the cast times need to be “looked at” as arenanet devs like to say.

Krafty.9758:

Davinci.8027:

Please do not make comments on what is viable/not viable, what is OP/UP, and whether rally should be in the game or not.

Are you suggesting people who only play tpvp can comment on balance?

All tpvp comes down to is “who can execute their theorycrafted plan better”. It doesn’t take tpvp practice to work this out.

It does not take a genius to work out the classes, moves etc and then to come up with an optimal setup of classes and how the moves will be integrated with one another.

Like a lot of people, i too have had many years of experience with actual competitive games (games a lot more competitive than the current setup GW2 has).

The day I (and many others) decide to do tpvp will be the day that Anet decides to follow up on its promises and provide the gaming community with an actual reason to play (given the obscene hype pre release).

As a competitive gamer i do not give a stuff about rewards/incentives to play. I play to win, simple as that. That feeling of competition is what drives true competitors.

So no…. I’ll continue to offer my opinion on balance where necessary and I’ll simply tear apart any logic you decide to throw at me.

Come at me bro

Ps, before you trolls go nuts, consider this. No I’m not a madbro, i just find it amusing how people try to justify just who should and shouldn’t comment on balance.

Bravo. I play tpvp and hotjoin, while they are very different, they also inevitably share a lot of the same issues, especially when it comes to class balance and especially in 1v1s, so if someone has formed their opinions from hotjoin experience this certainly does not make them invalid.

Pride N Greed.8106:

Wanderer.5471:

i did social studies in uni – designing questionnaires etc, and i can feel my lecturers face-palming as they read your question….

Congratulations! I am glad you are putting your lectures at work playing GW2. Maybe you should consider changing your gw2 career. I am just a common gamer. Did not know you need to go to university or have a high degree of eductaion to post on the GW2 Forums. I will keep that in mind next time thanks!

ok sorry, that could have been more constructive – biggest issue is you’re asking for one answer but asking 3 distinct questions