Guild Wars 2

Don’t ask me. From the several threads I’ve seen, every time bringing some old event back comes up, there are always people that say it messes with the lore.

Sure, why not. Who cares for lore implications, it’s all wonky at this point. Bring back the Four Winds festival in the Labyrinthine Cliffs with some NPC dropping a line of dialogue about an Asura Gate being built there and so forth.

Have a Consortium sign on top of the ship and have one NPC mention something like they are expanding in different areas like they tried with Southsun and replicated a Zephyrite ship. Would be a swell place to put back Moa Racing.

Dragon Bash can return annually. Even if we don’t fell another Dragon, we already got 2 and kill 3 of the Lieutenants daily. A dragon kill is a dragon kill.

They corrected the in-game tooltip. Wiki has also been corrected.

Looking back, the original in-game tooltip error would have been the better choice of the flanking bonuses being applied always. Wouldn’t even be brokenly good – just good. In PVE, even with the extended bonuses from the new LOYF, Quick Draw is still the better option.

However, in PVP and WVW during smaller skirmishes and duels, an always-flanking bonus would have been build-defining and advantageous for shortbow users in modes where getting the flank rarely occurs.

Overall, the new buff is… there. It’s just there. This is the second time the “other” iteration for LOYF has been better then the finalized one. Remember before when it was revealed to get the +10% damage and condition duration bonus while moving?

Would have been ace if we could have that AND an always flanking bonus. Wouldn’t mean jack kitten in PVE, but for WVW and PVP, it would be kitten nice.

kiwituatara.6053:

Would like to see SOTP become a stun break

Yeah. This is where a nerf this hard requires a huge buff to offset it. At this point, I’d almost say stun break, instant cast, and cooldown reduction to 60s would make people use it once again.

But even then, the loss of Remorseless synergy cannot be stressed enough.

Sheesh. Power builds are dropping out like crazy. Kind of makes me regret tossing my Thief’s condition set. Well, boys, it was fun not being healer for awhile.

It’s the typical imbalanced-balance of Anet. Double nerf one thing, in this case, torch on Ranger, and double buff another – Thief and Elementalist.

I hope you’re reading this Devs. You could unnerf the torch durations and Ranger still wouldn’t be able to hit what Thief and Ele now hit.

Man, I’m still waiting on Crippling Thrust to cleave up to 3 targets on sword and Viper’s Nest to hit 5 targets.

They even buffed Muddy Terrain in the past to affect up to 5 targets from 3, and the only time players even see it is when they change utilities since it’s on the selection menu.

Fashion Mage.3712:

Rampage as One isn’t a form/transformation.

Neither is Dagger Storm.

Last Warrior Lord.7248:

Grant Block on stability….. read the notes.

My justification on calling players noobs vailad. They complain the most.
You fail too read and comprehend as well.

It’s “…grant a block of stability…”

Read the notes, again. Block of stability =/= block on stability.

Like I said: Who knows! I don’t have all the infusions to pull the official numbers and 3 pieces of my armor are still exotic (gasp). I made ascended gear for my Chrono and Elementalist before, so, yeah.

It’s all a theory. One mad, mad, theory. Who knows, though. It might be a new meta(ish).

EDIT: Did a bit of testing on my sub-par gear. This build was pulling about 3k less DPS than the axe/torch & shortbow setup. Timings were not perfect, but it would still be less.

Aww, man. I was hoping this odd patch might have brought something more odd with it. That’s what I get theory-crafting at 4am.

With the latest change to Light on Your Feet and Refined Toxins, fellow Rangers that own both The Dreamer and Chuka & Champawat – REJOICE! There’s finally a build for shortbow (in PVE). Is it meta? Who knows! But after seeing the numbers, I’m sure someone out there will crunch it all.

Legendary Double (Short) Bow Build

Flank the boss. Spam 1, 2, 4 and weapon swap to your other (Legendary) shortbow off cooldown for more bleeds. With the new Light on Your Feet, Crossfire applies 9.75s of bleeding, 17.75s of poison from Poison Volley, and Refined Toxins tosses in 8 additional stacks of poison from you and your Pet while you spam traps and sharpening stone.

Why not Beastmastery? Because we only took it for Companion’s Might and Honed Axes so our Pet could get some boons since the target cap and priority of players over NPCs. Without the need of Honed Axes and Companion’s Might being weaker than Fortifying Bond, NM takes the cake while offering additional team support and a harder hitting Pet.

If you are low-manning it where your Pet can receive boons, then take Beastmastery with the usual traits, minus Honed Axes. Take Beastly Warden instead. Best of all, this build is more friendly on moving targets. All you need is 3s for the traps instead of 9s for Bonfire. Whatta change!

Edit: Man, that spike in Sigil of Geomancy’s price.

It won’t open up off-hand dagger. At least, not in PVE. Refined Toxins seems to be a better choice on single target encounters.

It’s easy to stay above 75% health and the PVE pet damage reductions pretty much guarantees it will poison the target, too. It results in 8 stacks of poison every 20s; 4 stacks at 12s from the Ranger and 4 stacks at 8s from the Pet.

Viper’s Nest w/out Trapper’s Expertise on 100% condition duration nets 9 stacks at 8s every 20s, granted, the poison we apply will deal more damage via Poison Master.

Torch nerfs were minimal, and losing out the extra condition damage when on the axe/torch set and 3 extra seconds on throw torch seems like a minor loss compared to what we can get now with Refined Toxins.

Not sure about Rune of Thorns, but Rune of Orr is out except for core/f2p players. All theory, though. One of the few good things to come out of this patch for Ranger… maybe.

Still not convinced about Light On Your Feet. If the change ends up that camping shortbow while flanking a boss is the new meta, then we’ll be in the same camp as power engineers camping bomb kit while having Turrets out.

Whether that’s a good thing or otherwise has yet to be determined, especially when condition Ranger is already easy to pick-up-and-play. /shrug

I don’t get it either. Eternal Champion? Sure. That was a GM trait on a mechanic with a 15s cooldown that also gives stability when breaking stuns. On Infusing Terror? Maybe. That thing has been nerfed a couple of times that I’m not completely sure, but all right, let’s give it a pass since it’s not an elite.

On Ranger’s elite shout though? I know they said it’s to allow better counter play due to boon removal, but I call BS since it happened to only our elite. Not Dagger Storm, Rampage, Tornado, or Lich Form. They could have just done a test adjustment by lowering the stability stacks pulsed from 3 to 1 and go from there.

Synergy with Remorseless was also blown dead. I’m at the point I wish they would just do something better with the effect, even if it were completely extreme. Ditch the pulses, lose the one-time swiftness and fury, keep the blob of stability, but change the effect so you and your pet grant each other might and fury on attacks. Up the cooldown back to 90s or 120s to justify it even.

At least then, we can have that Remorseless synergy back and not be completely left out in the dust by a single Corrupt Boon. But seeing how weird they wanna be with balancing, they might place a pulsing fury on Most Dangerous Game come 3 months.

Maybe it’s an over-reaction, but this change is the most baffling. The shout might as well be renamed to, “Runt of the Litter…”

It’s a great elite, but something seems off about being 10s duration and only 9 pulses, especially with a 1s cast time.

Wouldn’t it be better if it had 10 pulses? Move the vulnerability to the first pulse so it ends with 10 stacks of vulnerability on the target, reduce the burning stacks from 2 to 1, and have the final pulse inflict fear to give the elite a major “oomph” to end on.

That way, all the damaging conditions retain the same amount of stacks, and it’s punctuated with a condition that Necromancers are known for – Fear.

Updated the data to reflect today’s patch that reduced the Smokescale’s Smoke Assault damage by -15%. New DPS are in the “()” so the comparisons are visible from before and after the patch.

It’s so funny it is almost numbing. The boon spam was high, so they added more corruption and boon removal. Then reduced pulsing boons (specifically, stability), but kept the additional boon corruptions and removals while able to negate entire stacks.

Let’s also bring up that Strength of the Pack could have at least received a cooldown reduction back to 60s, but since it’s kept at 75s, making it statistically a weaker version of Signet of the Wild without a passive benefit.

Also, less synergy with Remorseless now, but at least we still have Most Dangerous Game.

Wouldn’t it have been better if they also allowed turrets to automatically overcharge once deployed and then every X amount of seconds thereafter (depending on the turret)?

It was kind of neat to actually use the overcharges if you kept them active before. Now, it’s a one and done deal with the trade off of using toolbelt skills. Why not both?

Yep. I thought maybe this patch would have corrected this bug. This happened before a bit after launch and they were good up until the February update.

And even during the February update, Drakes were working just fine on the initial update, but one of the later patches broke them.

Gah. Everytime I see a Ranger running around with a Drake pet, I don’t have the heart to tell them otherwise. Pretty sure they don’t even notice it either, but that’s beside the point.

That, and free-to-play and core players only have Drakes available to them as cleaving pets.

HotHit.6783:

At present the tooltip for the trait is incorrect. It increases the duration of the flanking bonuses of shortbow attacks as suggested by the patch notes. Concussion shot is the only exception, it now applies 10 stacks of vuln for 10 seconds when flanking, when traited.

Yeah. Tested that in game just now. The tooltip and the rework seems all together odd to me. It’s a static boost to the condition durations other than Concussion Shot. 2s to Crossfire and Poison Volley, and 1s to Crippling Shot.

I still wish they did something better with the trait instead of adding more stuff onto it.

One positive change that came from this was Troll Unguent.

Strength of the Pack durations are odd choices. The skill lasts 10s and the stability is set to 8s while the boons are at 12s. Why not just have them all at 10s?

Honed Axes change is “too little too late.” Rangers wanted this change back when power sword & axe Rangers were a thing 2 years ago. Swap the ferocity with precision and everything will be cake.

Though the change to Light On Your Feet is appreciated, the traits are becoming excessively overloaded with functions. Even for a Grandmaster, Light on Your Feet is decent now, but does 4 things (recharge reduction, 2 weapon modifiers, and 1 additional effect).

For Pete’s sake. Why wasn’t it reworked to something with more synergy instead of converting it so that people could be lazy with positioning in a game where positioning is kind of a thing?

Something like: “Light On Your Feet: Shortbow skills recharge 20% faster and pierce. Gain Light On Your Feet (8s) when you apply bleeding to a foe. Light On Your Feet effect: +2% outgoing condition durations per stack. Stacks up to 10 times.”

Has synergy with other weapons with bleeding while allowing weapons without bleed to activate it if Sharpened Edges was taken. Cuts down on 4 functions down to 3 and makes it much more appealing and competitive to Quick Draw.

Other changes I’m neutral on or not surprised at. I knew condition Ranger was going to take a hit when people started to stack them like Elementalists.

And here I thought adding 1 stack of Torment that lasts 10s on the active of Signet of Spite might be asking too much.

Doubt it. Like the first elite spec leaks, the only placeholders used were GW1 skill icons for the heals, utilities, and elites.

1) The blade is under the wrist in the image. Don’t ask me why the artist didn’t accentuate the weapon’s form. It seems they were more interested to accentuate the hilt design, which isn’t uncommon.

2) Main hand weapons are held in the right hand. Unless they wanna try something different like the leak of Necromancer’s “Scourge” spec that is supposedly a main-hand torch. Then by all means, let’s have that main-hand focus.

3) Would it be fitting? Yes. You know what would also be fitting? A class that is proficient in bows to fire a shortbow further than they can throw an axe.

Don’t depend on thematics, lore, or what would make sense when it comes to GW2 anymore. It’s all over the place as far as consistency is concerned.

4) I’m not going to reference or use cherry-picked designs from other weapon skins to make a case. Especially when we have staff skins that look like pole arms and foci that are whips, mug of ale, fan, and a model ship in a bottle.

That sounds like such a scam. Thank goodness I donated gold to a Charr Prince in need of funding for his country of Astralaria instead.

It seems like a simple and proper fix, but I’ve never seen the coding done to make that differentiation.

Reminds me of the old Ranger’s trait that had Spirits use their active skills when killed. The flavor text specifically states “killed” but it would also activate on natural expiration.

It’s almost as though they don’t know how to code for it or the engine has to be modified to handle it. The latter being more work and possibly not worth the effort to them.

Edit: Nevermind. I forgot about Explosive Powder. Even though it states “when destroyed” Turrets knockback only when detonated. Guess the suggestion is simple after all.

It’s a dagger. If it’s the traitline image being referred to, don’t look at the image and guess. The first trait on each one of those leaks has a weapon symbol. For the Ranger’s, it’s the one below. The sword weapon symbol is diagonal.

I’ll +1 both of these suggestions. Expert Examination suggestion I’ve seen before many times, but it’s a good one nonetheless. As for Gyros, I believe they don’t scale with player stats because they allowed them to have boons applied to them.

I’d assume if Gyros were altered to scale with the player’s stats, removing boon application would have to happen. No big loss if that happens since Gyros’ level of effectiveness doesn’t scale well with boons anyhow.

Heh. Would be neat if they incorporated critters into the Guild Missions system for hunting and capturing exotic animals for the Guild Hall.

Have some easy creatures placed in specific Guild Trek locations. Just interact to add them to the hall only when the Trek location is active.

Other animals could be added at the end of Guild Puzzles. Complete the puzzle and the pet makes that Guild’s hall its new home.

Harder creatures will move into the Guild Hall when certain Bounties are captured. Karka when Wildman is captured, a pack of rats from Yanonka, whatever animal Tricksy is disguised as, Brekkabek’s Brown Bear.

Stuff like that so they’re not just guild decorations or uneventful scavenger hunts.

Idea 1. Though, it would be nice if all the utility Wells did damage. So… Well of Suffering damage on Well of Power, too?

The dude’s got a point. Whatever we have bad, others have it equally worse, if not worse – somewhere. Though, more TLC with QoL changes should still be done to the core professions.

I’d be stoked at this point if Crippling Thrust on sword could just cleave 3 targets with Glyphs and “Guard!” working underwater. And whatever problems we may have with our current weapons, at least none of them have a stupid ICD on it when hitting NPCs.

It’s a bug. It occurs every now and then on movement skills like Ancestral Grace and Ride the Lightning. Not sure about the Druid back pieces or if every version does has that issue.

They need to fix a lot of things. Problem is: they are balancing with elite specs in mind. Which means they backed themselves into a corner they can’t get out from.

Many core aspects need TLC, and after seeing stuff like how Thief’s Acrobatic traitline was gutted just for Daredevil, it looks like a rough kittenin’ road ahead.

Should core professions (like Ranger) be fixed? You kitten bet. But would they? I don’t even want to think of what might be gutted for the next round of e-specs.

Spectral.

Or Beastly Warden’s range. Taunt is a powerful asset, no doubt, but I’ve had somewhat of a gripe with Berserkers having a 300 radius Taunt trait while our Pets are at 240. No one glances at that while Rangers get the, “that is so OP!” treatment.

As a side note: NM traitline is pretty lackluster overall. I find it crappy that a passive GM trait is one of the best things in that tier, and that if it wasn’t for Fortifying Bond, NM would be very lackluster.

That would be pretty neat, but only if it was a melee weapon. I saw the image and it appears to be on the main-hand.

Fluffball.8307:

Edit: WTH anet? Seriously? https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Icy_Roar
1.25 second cast time, 45 second cooldown, 600 range, 3 seconds of chill?

Hah. Yeah… One would think for a long cooldown like that, it would at least chill for about 8s or leave a pulsing ice field that also chills. A cooldown reduction to 30s would also be fine.

Sister Saxifrage.7361:

Are the stat numbers sized to compensate for no upgrade slot, like ascended backpacks?

No, they are not. There are no other HoT-stat exotic back items to reference, but compare the base stat points on core 3-stat exotic back items.

Exotic Druid Stone back items (first 3 tiers): 80 total stat points.
Exotic 3-stat Lv.80 back items: 72 total stat points

All the HoT stats came with a power-creep (more total stat points), so, yeah. Again, not sure why these don’t come with an upgrade slot available. I’m saving one of them just in case they are updated to have one. =/

What Swellmeister said. Not asking about the multi-tiered achievement. Asking about the upgrade slot for stones, crests, or whatever else.

All 3 of the exotic tiers in the collection are missing them. I’m asking as to if there is a specific reason or was this just another over-sight.

joshc.3129:

I agree they’ve been crying over the wreckage and the dead for over a year now! Time for them to rebuild and move on.

For real. Would be cool if Dry Top was updated just one more time with the Zephyrites rebuilding a sanctum there so the Four Winds festival can be brought back.

Grimwolf.7163:

It’s way too early to assume that the engineer will still be using a sword at release. Especially with their history of scrapping stuff for the engineer at the last minute

This is true. Here’s hoping for a MH shield instead. Double ShoOoshadoOOos! Flameseeker also ain’t too shabby.

Xaylin.1860:

From a developers perspective it is a bad choice to pile even more close combat power weapons on a class which already got two of those. So no, it wouldn’t make much sense unless they changed one of the existing ones. Of course, Dagger could still turn out to be power – I wouldn’t mind either. But it wouldn’t be too smart. Because roles of those weapons would overlap and one could become obsolete.

On a different note: Overperforming or meta builds are bad benchmarks when it comes to creating new specializations.

Dude… from anyone’s perspective, they’ve made plenty of bad choices. Main-hand melee power dagger seems like one of the smarter things they could give this class.

Not to mention, meta builds and benchmarks are valuable data to consider. If any of the devs think otherwise, then that’s how we end up with shlte like Most Dangerous Game being a trait Robert Gee tossed away, being smartly placed in the adept tier (Irenio knew what was up), then confoundedly moved to a grandmaster by other devs that weren’t either of those two.

By the looks of the icons, seems each stance has a represented pet already (the heal has a bear, the elite a wolf, the other utilities are a bird, a moa, and 2 that I can’t make out).

Seems interesting enough, especially with a trait icon of a bunny rabbit, even though we’re getting a dagger (I still wanted a hammer). ;/

Quick question: Is there a reason this particular exotic backpiece doesn’t have an upgrade slot for gemstones, rubies, or otherwise? Seems odd.

One thing I can give feedback on that I hope will change soon™ is the Oakheart’s Reach ability to become a special action key instead of replacing your weapon. It would make traversing the new map much more fluid so the player does not have to drop it to engage in combat.

Kudos on the map, making most of it accessible with previous masteries (standard gliding and thermal tube) while having it open completely up once the new mastery has been unlocked.

This mastery and its use with the map truly feels like horizontal progression in terms of what was mentioned back when Heart of Thorns was being hyped up and referencing games such as Metroid and Zelda.

I just hope it will find its way as a true mastery rather than being available only in this map. As with gliding, zip-lining with Oakheart’s Reach would open up a new way of traveling, even if that access was limited to Heart of Thorn and LS3 maps.

You don’t need to Quip if you have Hope. Though, after seeing the Holosmith, you might want to Bolt.

Similar to what Ivantreil has, but with Durability runes over Leadership and Firearms instead of Explosions. It changes a bit every time I link it but this is pretty sturdy and offers that same drunken boon-hammer play.

Drunken ‘n’ Durable Boon-Hammer

God kitten it. It’s going to be a main-hand sword… I was really hoping they would go all bonkers with a main-hand shield so dual-wielding Shooshadoo would be possible.

Holosmith sounds kinda neat, though.

Xaylin.1860:

The alternative would be making either Sword MH or GS a condi weapon.

Heh. I’d love for them to pull that one (seriously) for Sword. It hits much slower since the animations were changed that they might as well make it a full condition melee weapon so Dagger can be DPS.

GS is definitely out since it started out as a semi-pathetic hybrid when Maul had bleeds on it. Then they put it through the PoP filter (Purity of Purpose); I doubt they’d ever move it back if they were to do either of the alternatives listed.

Swagger.1459:

Whatever it is, it’s probably going to be like a low budget thief with subpar damage output and wonky “spirit” pet mechanics. Core ranger will still be “not good” either.

Sorry, not trying to be rude, but we know how it goes around these ranger parts.

Sadly, this is most likely true in so many ways. If the new e-spec did offer competitive DPS, the coefficients and scaling on the dagger skills and new pets would have to be near dumb levels while taking into account those damage modifiers from Marksmanship.

But, to try to keep things positive, this is a (hopefully) changed balance and design team. They keep insisting that they have learned mistakes from the last expansion and Jon Peters is gone.

So, maybe, just maybe, this e-spec might turn out decent (I’m keeping my hopes low) and a major trait overhaul might be done like last time to tighten up things (like replacing Most Dangerous Game and Predator’s Instinct). Oh, god. I hope they don’t try to build “synergy” in the new elite spec with those garbage traits…

I could have sworn it used to give the buffs when out of range. Unless I ran into range of all those ambient creatures just as I hit it and didn’t notice…

Gah. Still needs no target to use and receive the benefits. Kills 2 birds with 1 stone if it can get that.

Not even significant. Just being out of range now nets nada. When did this happen @@

Holland.9351:

Sic ’Em can no longer be used while the target is out of range.

• With trait or runes you can currently use it for the swiftness/regen/condi removal, but it’s a small price to pay.

Reflect now has a 50% chance to reflect projectiles in a random direction.

• Reflect is overpowered in that it gives both 100% damage reduction and 100% damage retaliation.

Yeah, no, on these 2 points right off the bat.

Sic ‘Em should be changed so that it does not require a target to use like Warrior’s “On My Mark!” which also reveals a single foe.

Most Rangers that use Sic ‘Em with a target that is out of range is because we want and should be able to use it without one. There should be no reason we can’t just give our Pet the movement and damage buff or shout to take advantage of Resounding Timbre or Trooper Runes without a target on this particular shout.

As for the reflect suggestion, no thanks. Instead, ask for some reflection sources to be toned down to projectile destruction and a reduction of reflection sources instead of asking for wonky RNG.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Reflect

Take a look at that list. Shattering Blow (Berserker), Defense Field (Scrapper), Electro-Whirl (Scrapper), and Punishing Strikes (Daredevil) can be toned down to simple projectile destruction.

Evasive Mirror and Master of Manipulation traits (Mesmer) could be worked into something a bit different. Master of Manipulation can be reworked so there’s less reflect but compensating them so there’s synergy within the Chaos line, such as: “Master of Manipulation: Manipulation skills recharge 20% faster. Use Arcane Thievery on a foe you disable. ICD: 35s"

Evasive Mirror could even be reworked so the reflect is toned it down while avoiding an ICD and making it based off of performance and the profession’s mechanic like: “Evasive Mirror: Gain ½s of Mirror for each illusion you have after you dodge roll. 0 Mirror duration if you have 0 illusions.” It would cut down reflection uptime and it synergizes with Evasive Deception in Dueling.

Shield Master trait (Warrior) can be locked to reflecting projectiles while blocking with a shield only or having shield skills reflect projectiles during activation, so their trait doesn’t just affect a single move like Honed Axes.

The last thing players want or need is more RNG when it comes to dealing with projectiles; just look at how swell that’s working out for Strider’s Defense, 50% or not.

Edited to add suggestions to toning down of reflections so things such as traits are not completely neutered.

Samug.6512:

leviathan.2148:

Wouldn’t swapping of skills 3 and 4 make OH pistol underwhelming?

If Pistol 5 had gotten longer immobilize time (2+ seconds) I say it would be worthy alternative to shield.

And maybe have Glue Shot’s range increased from 700 to 900 to match the rest of the pistol skills. I’d prefer to have both, but a 2s base immobilize ain’t too shabby, either.