Guild Wars 2

Hurray, more PvP lobbying to ruin perfectly fine PvE skills and mechanisms.

They buffed the shield to make it attractive in PvE over the other weapons, but this won’t last long if the PvP concern trolls have their way as usual.

Can we please remove the Continuum Shift rift from PvE

• Continuum Shift is virtually unusable in meta dynamic events, the rift dies immediately to AoE spam, keep this PvP garbage out of my PvE**

This is getting cheap and annoying. You’ve copied the same obnoxious mechanic from Archdiviner, Ettin, and now it’s on the hammer wielding frogs as well.

It’s supposed to be a frontal cleave, animated to show as such, but it actually hits behind their model, so you can’t even go to their back as the safe spot is pretty finicky and the swing animation misleading.

Also, please get back to the orange circles to indicate AoE, with zergs those little red outlines are covered all up by character models.

TheGuy.3568:

Zenith.7301:

TheGuy.3568:

I have a novel suggestion. How about upping the pets ai. Visible aoe like wells will force the pet to take a different route to target or wait to engage (2-3 seconds). Give the pet its own stamina bar and the ai to dodge an incoming attack periodically. This could be useless or useful depending on how you use it. We know you guys could do it. Why not try it out and see if it helps?

No. Making the pet sit dumb out of AoE doing zero DPS just so that it doesn’t die is readily available by jut setting your pet to follow.

The pets need to have aoe/cleave avoidance, and anything below drakes needs HP/toughness buffs to not be 1-2 shot by a boss when they get aggro.

They also need to get rid of that archaic 60 second death timer for the pet. It’s absurd.

I said path around too but thank you for ignoring that. I said dodge too but thank you for ignoring that too. I said delay (ie wait for a sustained skill like a well to run a bit then engage) but you ignored that too. Thank you for your feed back. I suggested upping the ai to that of a basic player and you said nope sounds bad.

Pets do not need an invul and players should not need to micro manage them to death. Give them better ai they will dodge big hits just like players do. I think maybe you might need an ai boost too. I kid but really?

I wouldn’t be talking about people needing better AI if you can’t use F3 to micro the pet. Pet classes are micro classes.

Don’t be so bitter that your suggestions suck.

The pathing would fix nothing, most bosses place those aoe on top of themselves, meaning the pet would pathe away from them and do nothing. Most of the things that kill your pet are not only circle AoE, but autoattack melee cleaves like mossman or archdiviner who autoattack for 10k+ damage a hit.

So, neither your pathing or evade on dodge would truly fix anything given the frequency bosses cleave and aoe, the pet would be virtually self CC’d the entire encounter trying to dodge while doing no damage itself.

Pets need invuln to AoE, it’s that simple. This becomes even more evident in WvW zerg clashes. Who out of the 30+ players is the pet going to path around the spammed aoe? And whose hits is it going to try to evade when it’s a sustained barrage of aoe and cleave far beyond a couple of seconds of evade frames.

You people really have no clue how pervasive and sustained high damage aoe/cleave in this game is.

Well, I guess we’re going live with no changes to the garbage shivers of dread, with shouts being useless still in PvE, with no viable adepts for PvE (augury of death is bad because shouts are bad and only wells will be used, chilling nova is mediocre, and relentless pursuit is mostly useless), and subpar grandmasters (reaper’s onslaught is of little use since reaper shroud is a DPS loss over greatsword usage so you’re gaining no DPS by traiting for shroud, and the other two are pathetically bad).

Oh, well, at least we’ll have Gravedigger spam to keep us relevant even if our group utility is still lackluster and many of our traitliness/utilities are a mess for PvE.

Shoe.5821:

Please tell me illusions will be added into this is well. It is very frustrating to summon an illusion and have it explode before you can do anything with it. Wasn’t so bad at all when we had on death traits but now that we don’t, we summon it and it dies before it can make an attack or be used for a shatter.

well first off wrong forum, second if you get a trait that grants illusions distortion on summon

This is stupidly ignorant, please don’t post about classes you know nothing about.

Distortion on summon is only for phantasms, not clones, and it competes for reflection on focus which means it will never be taken in PvE because reflects are more important for your group.

More importantly, it’s on Inspiration traitline, a non-DPS traitline and since all mesmers must go chrono for alacrity for the group, you have to drop either domination or dueling for inspiration, which nerfs your damage immensely.

The caveat of the build is that it relies on the fight allowing you to sit in wells in melee, otherwise it nosedives really quick on alacrity/quickness uptime if you are forced to move a lot and especially to stay split.

I’m gonna run the build wherever I can, but it’s become pretty clear to me that the mesmer cannot be sustained by this crutch alone in order to be an attractive class for the group.

I also will say I dislike the idea of our main source of alacrity sharing being tied to wells. The trait needed something, but I would have preferred that the alacrity to allies had come from shattering or summoning phantasms, since right now you’re forced to run a full well setup and basically dump the wells asap.

This sorta clashes with more strategic wells like Well of Precognition.

I’m also quite peeved that the Continuum Rift even exists in PvE and is cleaved down by aoe/attacked by mobs.

Sadly Arenanet seems to show no intention of making mesmer competitive sustained DPS and fixing shatter gimping your DPS in PvE due to the class being held hostage by PvP balancing.

And given that Supcutie has been running wells for alacrity share and PvP crybabies like mistsim and more will pop up with QQ, expect Arenanet to nerf our alacrity share without compensating the class despite the fact that the only thing keeping us in the meta is that very alacrity/quickness edge, otherwise Guardians would be taking our spots.

Exciton.8942:

As supcutie said, all the elite specialization has been pushed towards a pretty strong level.
Go watch phantaram play his revenant. He did 1million damage in a game. The old meta PU mesmer normally only do 25-30k damage per game. And the immortal dd ele also only do like 30k direct damage + 20k condie damage before nerf.

Revenant does around 8-12k unrelenting assaults on a single target at low to moderate might stack levels, which luckily the revenant can stack fairly easily.

Their autoattack is the strongest sword autoattack in the game, easily doing 40% more DPS than the mesmer autoattack, and the revenant autoattack also stacks 8-12 vulnerability by itself whereas the mesmer autoattack caps around 4-5 and with sword clones bumps up to 8-9 (sword clones will rarely be up so this is an unrealistic scenario).

Then we get to Shiro’s Impossible Odds, which allows them easy 4-5 seconds of swiftness every legend switch to Shiro on top of its super speed.

Mesmer is all burst, terrible sustained damage. Nerfing alacrity will completely negate what little help we got in the sustained damage department, but of course PvP has a history of keeping this class inferior in PvE.

Unrelenting Assault not only does over double the damage of blurred frenzy, it also teleports you to the target, evades for longer time, and grants you 7 stacks of might.

This game has no semblance of DPS balance across classes because it’s balanced around bursting 20k max health pools unlike in PvE where mobs have millions of HP.

bladex.9502:

Purple Miku.7032:

we have half a dozen or so devs actively checking every thread and looking for feedback. In fact, this is the most dev activity I’ve ever seen on this subforum.

Which is exactly why a lot of people are giving feedback atm, in the hopes that devs actually do something with it, unlike our experiences in the past with issues left undressed for months or even years.

I don’t see why we shouldn’t be allowed to give feedback because its only a small part of the complete raid.
After all its still a part of the raid, and if at least 1/3 of the raid has boring mechanics that’s not good for the complete experience.

People skip 70% of all mobs in current dungeons because they are boring and barely have any mechanics, and forcing you to kill those trash mobs, instead of actually giving them cool mechanics and making them worth killing sounds kinda sketchy to me.

Its pretty obvious why nobody has beaten the final boss yet, and that has nothing to do with it having some kind of super hard mechanics, because those were average at best, it has more to do with being kicked from the instance immediately.
I’m sure people will be able to beat the “real boss” fairly easily when we can actually play the raids again, but I guess we will have to wait for that

People don’t skip trash because it’s “boring”. Virtually every trash of every game is boring.

People skip trash in this game because:

a) The silver elite mobs are hp sponges with no meaningful loot tables, meaning it’s not profitable to spend extra time killing them because Arenanet doesn’t want people to farm and make good money off dungeons, otherwise they won’t buy their gems to convert to gold.

In every other MMO except FFXIV (because FFXIV has virtually no trash mobs in its raids, you go straight to the bosses), the trash can drop epics and other raid quality gear/profitable drops.

b) Because this game lets you. In any other MMO, skipping trash is made impossible by some means. FFXIV, even Wildstar raids now.

Irenio posted on the ranger forums that they’re working on a measure to help ranger pets and minions (which likely involves mesmer illusions) against AoE.

It’s just a crappier cleric staff guardian with a bunch of healing redundancy that in PvE is made obsolete by just laying down a water field and having people blast it to get everyone up to full in an instant.

As in, I don’t think they could make a healing class with even wimpier damage and less blocks with no boon generation as a downgrade.

Lynxer.9374:

Before anything else: yes I am proposing a nerf. No, not because I don’t like it, or I think it’s imbalanced, but because it may put the fun of this amazing elite spec at risk

Gravedigger, that wonderful, hard hitting ability that resets instantly when it hits an enemy below 50% hp, may be a bit too much. Not for short fights or trash fights, but for prolonged fights like world bosses etc. After 50 percent, with any power or crit build, its free, never on cooldown, and easily your easiest, hardest hitting ability. Half a boss’s hp…spamming one key does not sound like fun and depthy gameplay. I’m sure some will disagree with me, but it seems like using a gravedigger, or resetting a gravedigger will stop being an event, and just be that key you’re always spamming.

This could be easily negated in a number of ways: an out-of-shroud life force cost to add a risk/reward element, making it reset by less than a hundred percent or its cd when hitting a target below 50%, or having it have an rng chance to reset.

Anyhow that’s my thoughts. Agree? Disagree? Have at it.

So autoattacking for most of the time instead is a better solution? lol.

Omega Zoa.3859:

Kailee.8790:

…If this was easy, then we need a massive overhaul on dps for the druid…

I went full cleric with staff… it took ~2-3+ minutes for 1 veteran beetle… I just press 1 and alt tab

Beetles are immune to damage depending on where you attack them from.

It’s not beetles. Druid damage is total garbage. It’s like ranger greatsword DPS, but even worse.

It’s basically a crappier staff cleric guardian.

TheGuy.3568:

I have a novel suggestion. How about upping the pets ai. Visible aoe like wells will force the pet to take a different route to target or wait to engage (2-3 seconds). Give the pet its own stamina bar and the ai to dodge an incoming attack periodically. This could be useless or useful depending on how you use it. We know you guys could do it. Why not try it out and see if it helps?

No. Making the pet sit dumb out of AoE doing zero DPS just so that it doesn’t die is readily available by jut setting your pet to follow.

The pets need to have aoe/cleave avoidance, and anything below drakes needs HP/toughness buffs to not be 1-2 shot by a boss when they get aggro.

They also need to get rid of that archaic 60 second death timer for the pet. It’s absurd.

Embolism.8106:

Zenith.7301:

Xyonon.3987:

Zenith.7301:

You people are talking as if mimic feedback is all that great when Guardian’s Wall of Reflection traited last as long as two back to back Feedbacks with mimic.

I prefer to trait feedback thank you very much. It’s also much more reliable than a wall will ever be.

Yeah ok lol. PvP guy talking obviously.

Feedback isn’t really used in PvP.

A PvE guy would not be calling Wall of Reflection unreliable. It’s unbelievably dumb considering it’s used with the same effectiveness as feedback, except better because YOU place it as opposed to its position being tied relative to the mob.

Feedback is used in WvW. To me WvW qualifies as PvP. There’s a reason I said PvP guy and not sPvP.

EthanLightheart.9168:

Levetty.1279:

Well my Druid is bugged in PvE and I no activate my pets.

On the plus side perma stow pets yay?

Umm why are you too lazy to delete it? Come on it’s a beta character… brains on please.

Some of us are using character makeover kits to approximate our toons (such as kit exclusive hairsyles and colors), and said kits are not restored by making a new toon…“brains on please”

Cecilia.5179:

Condi Reaper is amazing in WvW. I was able to win a 3v1 against 2 druids and a scrapper, and I felt kind of epic afterwards. My only suggestion would be to reduce the icd on Chilling Nova down to 5-8 seconds. It felt like it only procced once in a blue moon.

Druids are worthless garbage so it’s nothing to brag about, really.

It’s like beating a cleric staff guardian except with less damage and blocks.

People, you can’t use the pets in PvP. That’s it.

In PvE you can use them.

Xyonon.3987:

Zenith.7301:

You people are talking as if mimic feedback is all that great when Guardian’s Wall of Reflection traited last as long as two back to back Feedbacks with mimic.

I prefer to trait feedback thank you very much. It’s also much more reliable than a wall will ever be.

Yeah ok lol. PvP guy talking obviously.

You people are talking as if mimic feedback is all that great when Guardian’s Wall of Reflection traited last as long as two back to back Feedbacks with mimic.

Pets

General

Crit chance and ferocity for pets should honestly be tied to the master’s crit and ferocity. This prevents pvp cries about bunkers doing high damage, while buffing the pet in PvE where a measly 1500-1600 precision is way low.

Smokescale will likely be appealing to most because basically it’s a dog with revenant’s unrelenting assault (meaning it does around 8-12k damage on a 24 sec cd) and a smoke field for protection.

Bristleback Our best ranged pet, how all our ranged pets should be, 1200 range, and hopefully they’ll fix pet AI so it can shoot at enemies up walls or down from them in WvW instead of sitting staring like an idiot.

Tiger Make pet boons 1200 range. Should be a thing since you can’t control pet positioning. Jaguars need an increase in HP as well. They’re paper thin and unsustainable as pets in most content that isn’t spvp.

Wyverns

The big stinker of the new pets. Their low precision at 1500 is appalling paired with their sluggish, slow autoattack, making their DPS horrendous. I’m pretty sure the Bristleback, a ranged pet, kills significantly faster than this one.

Wyverns not only have terrible sustained DPS due to the slow and sluggish autoattack (which like many of their attacks, miss moving opponents, their crippling tail swipe makes them stationary and their autoattacks are similar, committing the same mistake of rooting the pet and making the pet have low uptime on a target).

On top of having low sustained DPS due to the slow attack rate and low precision, they have no burst skill unlike the bristleback’s spike barrage or the smokescale’s smoke assault.

What’s more, the wyverns will also be highly unattractive in PvE because their wing buffet knocks back enemies and it’s not a f2 skill so we can’t control when the pet will spread mobs out that may have been gathered close for aoe. It will kitten off your groups.

Then we have the lightning Wyvern’s storm field. The F2 is a quick knockdown and thankfully highly responsive. However, the storm field doesn’t even do damage! For a 30 sec cd skill it could afford some damage on the scale of spike barrage or smoke assault. Make it a static field instead of an air field so it can be comboed for daze instead of swiftness, which the game is already saturated with (anyone can spit out swiftness far easier with a lesser cooldown).

The fire wyvern fares no better. The f2 has a huge windup where the pet is doing no damage whatsoever as it spits fire down, and at best it gives 1-2 short burning stacks a tick, on a whopping 34 sec cd. Basically the fire wyvern’s F2 is a terrible DPS loss for a delayed fire field on a 34 sec cd. Not worthwhile.

To summarize the wyvern : the key problems are the low precision, the rooting and slow animations of the autoattack, tail lash (the worst offender), and wing buffet (which will miss pretty much all the time against a foe that is moving, all they need is to sidestep even).

The wyverns are a huge letdown ;(, and given how deeply tied to self rooting animations the wyverns attacks are, I’m not sure if the pets can be salvaged before HoT releases.

Basically the wyverns took all the bad from our previous pets, since one of the core ranger complaints is that pet attack animations root them, meaning foes that are walking make it impossible for the pet to connect attacks or have the high uptime that ranger damage is based around.

The glyphs all seem awfully undertuned.

General issue: 300 range based around the ranger is pitifully small, and doesn’t really align well with staff usage, where you want people to be in between your beam for healing so you’ll try to modify the distance.

Consider making glyphs ground targeted

Glyph of Rejuvenation: The heal does less healing than we heal as one, or any other heal for that matter. For what? 1.1k base ally healing? You get far more out of healing spring by blasting the water field for your allies.

The glyph heal will become like the water spirit, completely outclassed in group healing by any water field, not just group heals. As such, it will not be used, since it has a cooldown of 24 seconds as well, close to healing spring and it doesn’t even remove conditions.

Glyph of Alignment: 3 second cripple and weakness are too short to make it a worthwhile utility, and the damage is nothing to write home about. It’s basically less than an autoattack. The breakbar also heavily diminishes the value of this glyph, basically all bosses will be immune to this glyph and 3 seconds of cripple and weakness aren’t something of note for the purpose of damaging a break bar. Might as well use hard CC.

Glyph of Equality: This should be a stunbreak baseline for the ranger when out of celestial form. No Glyphs are stunbreaks, why? Having to be in celestial form to deal with stuns on the druid toolkit is impractical.

The Celestial variant of this glyph in addition to the stunbreak should grant stability or protection. The glyphs in general feel bareboned and low impact. They won’t compete for group utility with spirits.

Glyph of Empowerment : The weakest of the glyphs. 10% for 6 seconds out of 20 sec cd translates to a 3% damage boost to people within 300 range. It’s pitiful and not even half the bonus of frost spirit, it won’t be worth a utility slot.

You either need to bump the percentage considerably, leading to worries about spikes in PvP (which I doubt you’ll split balance for PvE).

My suggestion would instead be bumping the percentage up to 15% and make it a 15 second duration, increasing the uptime of the glyph and giving it more effective boost than frost spirit given the glyph’s 300 range limitation.

Glyph of the Tides: Swap the effects between forms, why put the offensive (pull) aspect on a form with zero offensive tools? Celestial Form is a defensive tool with no offensive play whatsoever.

Moreover, add a 2 second chill to the pull, and a 4 second cripple to the knockback.

The effectiveness of the pull/knockback at 300 glyph range is still dubious, might have to increase it.

Traits

Minors: The most problematic of the tree, these minors basically mean you use the staff or you don’t benefit at all outside celestial form, heavily penalizing the use of offensive weapons that are not staff. No other weapons heal, so the traits become obsolete when using a greatsword or longbow.

Live Vicariously

The first minor should convert damage to healing and healing to damage. Each heal you give to an ally damages foes for x nearby them, and any damage you do heals allies for x. This will support a wider variety of ranger weapons and builds.

Natural Mender

Change it to also give outgoing damage whenever you use a healing skill. Better yet, instead of just based on healing, tie it to also giving allies boons. This will synergize with clarion bond, potentially shouts, warhorn, and boons your pet applies.

Adept

Druidic Clarity: Make it so when you enter celestial form, it breaks stuns off the ranger as well.

Cultivated Synergy: Apply 4 seconds of vigor as well.

Primal Echoes: The active effect is no good. You won’t be switching to staff in melee range most of the time, as the swords are far better defensively, so the daze will be wasted when you most need it.

Just give 1 second of vigor when using a staff skill to the druid and allies affected by said skill. Or something else, just not some niche 300 range daze tied to a weapon swap, it’s too weak in PvE where weapons are camped far longer than in PvP.

Master

Celestial Shadow: Increase to 4-5 seconds. Celestial Form usage and exit is too infrequent for this trait to really be worth it.

Grandmaster

Ancient Seed: Another grandmaster that will be neutered by breakbars on bosses. You need to change this into something else that is of any worth in PvE.

Staff

I can kill things with retaliation faster than I can kill with this staff. It needs flat out sizable buffs on all its skills.

You are turning this into the guardian staff, except worse, a staff with some small healing at the complete expense of any damage potential. You are pigeonholing this class into a cleric healbot set, something that will make many of us who rolled rangers unhappy.

Besides all the skills doing pretty horrid damage, Vine Surge also has an immobilize that lasts way too little. Should bump it to 3 seconds.

The only good skill on this weapon is skill 5.

Skill 2 on the staff is particularly surprising, because you would expect it’d pulse damage like the orb pulses healing when it passes around allies. Not so, just one pititful damage pulse.

• For reference, I am in full ascended zerker stats, armor, accessories, weapons, with scholar runes. Staff 1 was doing ~1k damage, staff 2 1,2k damage. This is unacceptable, it’s a fraction of our already low sword and greatsword autoattack damage**

Closing thoughts on the class in general

Highly disappointing. The druid is a one dimensional healbot with no damage synergy and weak offensive options.

This means if you take a zerker stat or traitlines like marksmanship or skirmishing or even beastmastery, this line won’t complement them or any of your weapons for that matter.

The druid traitline and the staff don’t mix well at all with a PvE offensive ranger. Since you’ll always want a melee weapon for damage output, the staff competes with longbow. And boy, what little healing you gain from the staff is not worth the massive damage and CC loss, not to mention cleave from the longbow.

Druid feels like a forced bland clerics stats healbot meant to tickle opponents while building celestial force, mainly through heals since the percentage from damage is so low, to spam some more healing on allies at the complete cost of your DPS since celestial form doesn’t even have any damage.

What’s more, this spec may see the light of day in pvp, but in PvE it gimps your group’s damage output for healing that isn’t even necessary because in PvE all a group needs to heal up to full is to lay down a water field and with the amount of blasts ele/guardian/warrior/engineer/thief have, a group is healed back to full immediately without needing a ranger to kitten his damage completely by going druid.

Time to stow away my staff and shelf my ranger for the time being until changes are made. This specialization has pushed people who rolled rangers to play as damage dealers and offensive support away by being a bland healbot spec.

The list of druid skills and traits can be summarized by “this skill heals and removes conditions, this other skill heals and removes conditions, and this skill also heals and removes conditions”.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

The underlying system of combat is built around area attacks. This is why the majority of base weapon attacks strike multiple targets in the affected area, unlike other games which strike one target – the one you have selected. Our system makes things like positioning and facing far more important and engaging; this also means that the concept of ‘AoE’ is not as easy to distinguish and thus handle in different ways.

That said, we are currently looking at systemic ways to help with player pet and minion survivability.

Please do something.

Coming out of the dredge fractal with the ice elemental boss making me have my pet permanently on follow because otherwise it gets immediately downed by clustered ice spikes and all that lethal AoE spam is annoying. Same goes for Molten Duo.

In addition, this extends to bosses with melee cleave like Mossman and Archdiviner and Ettin who do such immense casual cleave damage with just melee autoattacks that I can’t even run jaguar pets to do as close to competitive DPS to other players in my group, having to instead resort to run to much lower DPS pets like drakes.

It’s also curious that out of all the melee pets we have, only drakes cleave. Which disadvantages the ranger specifically in cleave damage output compared to other classes, since the competitive DPS pet, the jaguar, does not cleave. A warrior, guardian, elementalist, engineer, reaper and thief are doing significantly more cleave damage.

Please also look into scaling pets to the player’s ascended stats. All other classes gain 100% benefit to their damage from ascended stats, yet ranger pets stay static so in the best case scenario of jaguar making 17% of our total damage (other pets do far less a %).

Pets also cannot achieve the same level of ferocity as a berzerker player, so in several ways our pet is not scaling as well as we are, and it makes the ranger fall behind the other classes as their damage output is balanced around the presence of a pet that doesn’t scale with potions, sigils, food, runes, or ascended gear stat upgrades.

Should be no less than a 10% group damage buff to merit a utility slot. Why would you ever slot it for any other utility.

Frost Spirit is essentially a 7% group damage buff with a 1200 range. Glyph of Empowerment, as with most glyphs, is a puny 330 range.

Just increase the uptime. 15% extra damage for 15 seconds.

I’d rather the buff have higher uptime so it’s valuable in PvE, because if we increase the percentage, then the PvP garbage crowd will get it nerfed due to burst concerns in no time and as we know Arenanet developers have some moral objection to splitting PvE/PvP balance nowadays.

Which is a big flaw with condi damage.

In other games, DoT’s have larger damage to account for their backloaded nature. If you can have a class that will deal its damage in burst and all of it frontloaded as opposed to a class that deals the same damage but over a longer period of time, why would you ever take the latter?

Burst is not only superior to DoT based if they both do equal damage, but in any case where adds are a mechanic and they need to be eliminated quickly, or damage switches happen (target change), the burst spec is significantly advantaged.

It doesn’t mean DoT damage should have a large DPS advantage, but in general their sustained damage should have an edge over the conveniences of direct, burst damage.

Elorna.5329:

Yeah in that case, the more the mobs move, the better immobilise sources become. Or alternatively, ranged damage, both of which ranger brings.

But not as a condi spec.

Condi ranger has even more horrendous cleave, its only condi cleave being bonfire, and axe/torch is a shotgun spec, meaning point blank melee. Condi ranger has no ranged options, since shortbow is horrendous and has been overnerfed over the years thanks to pvp.

It’s even more inflexible than its power variant. It has no mobility whatsoever as well or built in dodges. If the power build was lacking depth, the condi spec is about as one dimensional as it gets. The power spec has the luxury of bringing in warhorn for blasts and call of the wild which is actually sorta decent if only in need of cooldown reduction (knock it down to 25 secs cd), and it can bring offhand axe for extra reflects or path of scar’s pull and disruption.

And if they ever do buff greatsword, it’s gonna be a pretty awesome weapon. The power weapons synergize a lot better anyways, as condi you’re stuck pretty much with axe/torch and that’s as far as it goes.

Jerus.4350:

Zenith.7301:

Elorna.5329:

Yeah in that case, the more the mobs move, the better immobilise sources become. Or alternatively, ranged damage, both of which ranger brings.

But not as a condi spec.

Condi ranger has even more horrendous cleave, its only condi cleave being bonfire, and axe/torch is a shotgun spec, meaning point blank melee. Condi ranger has no ranged options, since shortbow is horrendous and has been overnerfed over the years thanks to pvp.

It’s even more inflexible than its power variant. It has no mobility whatsoever as well or built in dodges. If the power build was lacking depth, the condi spec is about as one dimensional as it gets.

Splitblade, bouncing axe, flame trap, sun spirit… am I missing something?

Yes? Listing abilities does not comment on their effectiveness. Splitblade only functions at all in point blank range, so it’s not really cleaving, bouncing axe is the worst, most horrendous and useless autoattack in the game, and flame trap, as I said, is basically a bonfire clone. Sun spirit can be used by any ranger spec and will be for the benefit of the group (ranger will bring sun, frost, storm spirits unless they make Glyph of Empowerment not total garbage as a 10% damage boost for 5 seconds on a 20 sec cd, which is basically a 2.5% group damage increase or basically around a third of frost spirit’s bonus, aka terrible).

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Zenith.7301:

Warrior has 170 to all stats, plus another 150 power to allies, on top of the only reliable and best group rez tool, War Banner (which might be worth a kitten in actually challenging content). It’s going to be brought.

I said above I’d replace the guardian with 2 spirit/spotter rangers, but the reason you would bring Guard is Communal Defenses aegis spam.

I mean phalanx strength specifically. With might taken care of, Axe/X will see more use.

And if Berzerker’s fixes are any good, Sinister condi warrior might also be a thing.

Warrior has 170 to all stats, plus another 150 power to allies, on top of the only reliable and best group rez tool, War Banner (which might be worth a kitten in actually challenging content). It’s going to be brought.

I said above I’d replace the guardian with 2 spirit/spotter rangers, but the reason you would bring Guard is Communal Defenses aegis spam.

With the caveat that the spirit gets blown up pretty much immediately due to aoe/cleave spam.

Besides, standard necro pve will be dagger/focus+greatsword. 12 permanent vuln stacks from greatsword alone, only 3 less than storm spirit and the reaper doesn’t need to sacrifice any for that.

Add in well of suffering, since no reapers would use anything besides well of suffering/corruption/power and signet of spite since the shouts are pathetic garbage in PvE.

Necro stacks vuln a lot better than ranger. And if he takes bitter chill or rending shroud, it’s game over.

The other part is ranger can’t do competitive DPS on anything remotely challenging. Try to reliably melee archdiviner or mossman as a 1h sword ranger without your communal defenses guardian spoon feeding you aegis.

A lot of these so called theoretical DPS output on the ranger is seen on explorable dungeons where bosses are little more than sandbags who pose no threat to you in melee, so the fact the 1h sword autoattack roots you and delays dodging is of no issue (and you can turn off autoattack to preemptively dodge, which still involves not attacking for a bit to not get locked in the animation, so it’s still a DPS loss compared to someone who doesn’t need to stop attacking seconds before a dodge).

Ranger also happens to have the worst cleave/aoe DPS in the game, and no the wimpy glyphs aren’t going to change that. If you thought pet survival outside drakes and bears was a pain, imagine raids with their even worse lethal AoE/cleave spam is gonna do to pets.

Hint, Vinewrath, Liadri, Molten Duo, Archdiviner, Mossman should give you indication you won’t be able to use jaguars anywhere in challenging content, nerfing your DPS absolutely to bring a garbage DPS pet that doesn’t get 2 shot but still ultimately dies to aoe of the Molten Duo/Liadri/Vinewrath variety.

I mean, it’s already impossible to play without Beastmastery due to the pet swap recharge if you don’t want your pets to die or have to call them back to you until your heal is back up because each boss melee swing takes off half the pet’s health from the cleave.

If only they were as quick to hotfix mainhand sword not locking you out of dodging, our damage in general with power weapons besides longbow not being terrible….

And of course the AoE spam that 1-2 shots even drakes, which are lower dps than jaguars on an already low dps class.

Trevor Boyer.6524:

Three things:

• Rangers in their current state are not as underpowered as everyone thinks they are.
• Rangers are actually extremely powerful in 1v1 situations in their current state.
• That Heal As One boon stacking wasn’t good and in no way was it OP.

Well, good to know your useless ego stroking 1v1 which contributes nothing to a single format or team objective play is what matters!

Pikachu.1829:

ironfrodo.7625:

Pikachu.1829:

ironfrodo.7625:

bladex.9502:

So, 10s slower than the previous 38 seconds, that means there’s basically a 20% DPS loss.
How does that show that the meta will not be changing? 20% is a pretty big amount, which can be made up by swapping at least 1 ele out for a class like engi, which does in fact change the meta

I tested already Engineer and Ele DPS after patch for around 3 hours and elems still better.

Are you sure you are testing out sinister Engi with the right rotation? According to the spreadsheet, sinister Engi have higher DPS even before this patch. Zerker Engi probably caught up Ele in DPS as well. Not saying Engi > Ele, but I highly doubt Ele has higher DPS, if you mean higher AoE burst then I trust you.

Oh yeah should’ve clarified that i tested in a group setup that i generally use in fractals and not solo dps.

Sustain DPS wise sinister Engi is still higher regardless. People want Ele not solely for DPS, it’s for their AoE and burst. I don’t know what set up you are talking about, it would be nice if you post some data.

They want ele for more than that. 2 water fields, one that pulses condition removal, aoe high duration chill, AoE static field, a line of warding, a line cast root, glyph of lightning/sandstorm, and the earth elemental signet.

All of that condensed into a single weapon without having to spread yourself thin on utilities and built into the very weapons that is also your highest DPS.

Ele isn’t going anywhere even if they nerf meteor shower and persisting flames. The class is a walking set of group utility, combo fields and blast finishers, and compared to engineer the ele can get his maxmimum amount of damage from range close enough to the group’s boon sharing whereas the engineer involves more risk with comboing the bomb kit in an environment where melee might actually be dangerous/prohibitive at times in raids.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I’ve been working on assembling a raid team, but we are having problems due to the buff limit…

In order to optimize our group we are ending up with:

2 PS warriors
2 Staff ele’s
2 Chrono’s
2 Herald’s
2 Guardian’s

Just to give us maximum DPS… this leaves us… 0 raid spots for any other classes. I can’t find any way to justify bringing a thief, a reaper, a ranger, or an engineer into the raid.

Is there a way around the buff limit? Will it be raised to 10 in squad groups? I hate to tell all the other classes they need to just flat out reroll or wait until farm status, but I’m not seeing a way around it right now.

I swap out the 2 guards for 2 rangers. Frost Spirit and Spotter and Sun Spirit are a considerable group boost in raids that simply isn’t necessary in dungeons because most things melt in under a minute whereas the 7% damage boost, precision, and combined group burning procs translate into a lot more extra damage in fights with a longer duration.

Chronos cover all reflects guardians do, have more quickness, and with inspiring distortion and blurred inscriptions can achieve the same thing as aegis.

Nokaru.7831:

I understand that some people here in this community are really jaded and feel disenfranchised. I don’t really think though that being cynical is that constructive. It’s not the raid teams fault about what happened with Dungeons or Fractals.

(Or is it… Maybe there’s some conspiracy here…)

It just makes me a bit sad to see new developers popping up enthusiastically around here and seeing them shot down by what they might perceive as their target audience. I’m not saying to be hyped, or getting your hopes up. Just remember though that these are people though that (I think) might give you the best shot at the content you want.

I don’t care about their feelings.

They clearly haven’t cared about mine when for THREE YEARS my necromancer and ranger have been unwanted in PvE, and my mesmer is little more than a portal bot with miserable damage output.

Pets/illusions/minions/spirit weapons/ranger spirits are still annihilated by aoe/cleave in PvE and WvW with no fix in the horizon.

And even in this patch, what little they give to mesmer/necro/ranger in PvE, as usual they take away for PvP reasons.

It took three years to get a precursor scavenger hunt (which they had advertised six months into the game’s release) walled behind a paywall of an expansion.

Can we just make Fortifying Bond baseline already? This is just dumb. Why should I sacrifice my heal to share boons with my pet because of the 5 target boon limit cap.

The pet is a direct percentage of my damage deducted from all ranger power weapons, it should scale with all my stats if our weapons are going to have lesser coefficients for it.

Isn’t it lovely how you’ve got time to hotfix a gimmick pvp build but god forbid you actually fix the godkitten ed 1h sword autoattack locking out dodges or buff our miserable weaponskill coefficients for that matter.

While we’re on the topic of ranger grivances, why is Serpent Strike on a 15 second cd? It’s a 1/2 second evade that does a tiny fraction of the damage of unrelenting assault, pistol whip, or even blurred frenzy.

Why is Monarch’s leap a dodge with a cast time? It makes the dodge useless in pretty much most circumstances as most boss attacks are quicker than the cast time itself.

Why is Call of the Wild a 30 sec cd skill? 3 stacks of might and 15 secs of fury, an ele with persisting flames does an eruption>lava font and suddenly the group is sitting at the same amount of might stckas, with capped might from other people’s blasts, with permanent fury due to persisting flames.

Then this horrendous 3 might cap on we heal as one. Meanwhile Phalanx Strength caps might for FIVE PEOPLE with a single press of 100 blades, elementalist gives permanent fury with persisting flames and a permanent fire field with lava font.

But, nope, a gimmick pvp build using we heal as one selfishly, which didn’t even grant boons to allies, was the problem.

Good to know your priorities. Meanwhile nobody wants a ranger in PvE still, all our weapon autoattacks and skills besides longbow do pitiful damage, especially the axe autoattack, and our traitlines are still a mess, with incredibly garbage traits like Strider’s Defense, Most Dangerous Game (3 seconds of 5 might at 50% health lol, seriously what a stinker of a grandmaster) and nature’s vengeance (wow, 3 stacks of might from a spirit, totally worth a grandmaster slot compared to phalanx strength or persisting flames).

And it’s pretty clear you guys also have no intention of fixing pet survivability against the aoe/cleave spam in PvE, forcing us to stow away jaguars in favor of drakes/bears that do autoattacks which hit less than a 1-2 stack tick of burning damage.

Melee pets outside drakes still don’t cleave. Our pets do not benefit from rune or sigil bonuses, no food or potion bonuses, no ascended gear upgrade bonuses, the pets cannot reach the same ferocity levels the player can, only up to 70% bonus crit damage while the player is looking at 110%+.

And now you’ve turned our elite specialization into a one dimensional heal bot with no offensive options and traits that are only based on healing (and celestial form tied to healing over damage, making sure no druid not wielding a staff can make use of the traitlines and celestial form anywhere close to as well as a staff healbot druid).

Don’t bet on mesmer DPS ever being fixed. PvP supremacy at the expense of PvE is here to stay.

They didn’t bother fixing aoe/cleave gutting our illusions and by extension our performance. They didn’t fix shatters being a mechanic that gimps your sustained output, in fact tied a half way solution to a grandmaster instead (chronophantasma).

They gave a pitiful 10% to sword auto while Blurred Frenzy got no change and is just a crappier, immobile version of Unrelenting Assault, and even a weaker version of pistol whip.

The entirety of the class, the fact that no meaningful changes have been made to the garbage that is Cry of Frustration (and confusion for PvE, in fact), is based around considerations of damage against 12-20k hp targets is going to keep mesmer in the gutter of PvE.

DeceiverX.8361:

Zenith.7301:

It needed way more than a 10% increase. Why was 10% settled on on all the bad autoattack weapons for necro and mesmer, while thief is receiving 25%+ damage boosts?

Because the pistol’s power scaling was worse than Axe’s with arguably just as poor utility and suffered from projectile problems. Actually, the pistol is still really bad because Body Shot is pretty much the worst skill ever made.

Axe has crazy burst LF generation and with excessive damage would make it a safer dagger with range and no projectile deficiencies. While it might not be perfect as is, it’s better to see incremental buffs in the right direction (we’ll also see what goes on with the Reaper due to its LF-generation dependencies) rather than monsters emerge like PU mes and burn builds did after the 6/23 changes.

Yeah because PU mesmer was so good at anything besides hurting pvp crybaby feelings in 1v1.

So many Guild vs Guild used them, and it was totally meta in PvE.

In fact said “monster” burn builds are the only condition specs competitive and viable in PvE against berzerker whereas the garbage bleed/confusion/torment centric necromancer and mesmer end up as the weakest condi specs in PvE.

Opening Strike should refresh on the ranger like every 20 seconds or 15 seconds anyway.

The whole concept of opening strike is terrible in PvE with sustained encounters, clearly another example of them only designing traits/skill for pvp.

UBcktieDL.5318:

Zenith.7301:

Which it shouldn’t have anyways. 10 sec icd on 3 vulnerability stacks is pathetic. Basically only makes it useful when in a group of 5 people fighting in proximity.

You’re sacrificing a utility slot when an engineer can cap vuln by just throwing grenades, which is his DPS setup.

My necromancer alone can keep up 15+ stacks of vulnerability rotationally without any utility skills.

Come HoT with reaper you cap vulnerability in an instant.

The spirits die to a sneeze and won’t have 100% uptime on most content that is actually challenging anyways, due to the aoe/cleave spam and the spirits for some stupid reason are on the aggro table, making mobs attack them.

Anyone who thinks a 50% nerf to ice bow is gonna make ranger replace an elementalist is an idiot, ranger DPS is only above necro and mesmer. I’s about as mediocre as it gets and more importantly that’s peak idealized performance, not the practical DPS of trying to use 1h sword on archdiviner or mossman.

As if elementalist can do perfect rotations on diviner and mossman. 3,5s channeled meteor shower anyone? And pls give some proof about dps numbers before you claim anything.

The problem with elementalist is: It is taken for DPS and some swiftness and fury(at least the staff build). It works good for eles as long as they remain the highest DPS class in the game. As soon as ele falls behind in dps in favor of some other class, they will drop out of the meta. Icebow nerf reduced ele’s burst a lot and, more important, they no longer have party-wide dps buffs beyond basic boons.

lol have you even stepped in a fractal 50? This comment is so unbelievably dumb.

Elementalist gets perfect rotations easily. It’s a ranged build that can stand just right behind the melee stack to still be in range of boon sharing but be far away from boss melee attacks, and with a communal defenses guardian the ele basically never needs to worry about getting meteor showers off.

“Provide DPS numbers”. How about you stop being lazy and look up the DnD/rT guild spreadsheets that have been constantly linked in forums and is available in their webpage?

I’m not about do your homework for you. It’s your responsibility to be informed instead of spouting off this clueless crap.

P.S. Ele doesn’t just provide “boons”. It’s the class that can provide permanent fury on its maximum DPS loadout, it provides a permanent fire field on lava font, it has access to TWO water fields on that same weapon, has 2 blasts, an AoE daze, a line root, a line of warding, and an aoe chill field. Earth elemental elite (compared to your crappy bear pet which nerfs your ranger’s dps considerably). Glyph of Sandstorm for aoe blind.

On top of the highest single target and aoe DPS currently in game. Even if engineer beats ele in DPS, ele brings so much utility besides DPS it will always be meta.

Cameron Rich.3905:

Kitty.1502:

ArenaNet stopped supporting Dungeons with new content 3 years ago.
ArenaNet stopped supporting Fractals with new content 2 years ago.
ArenaNet stopped supporting Guild Missions with new content 2 years ago.
ArenaNet stopped supporting Raids with new content.. starting Oct?

Ultimately I only bring this up because ArenaNet has a strong history of not supporting us with new content. I just wonder when this will happen for raids too, another aspect some of us will grow to love and it will then lose support. With that said, they are adding supposedly new world bosses that are challenging, so we got that going for us?

Fractals is getting a revamp and additional rewards (like the new weapon skins we announced) with the expansion. You can read more about this here:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-brand-new-fractals-of-the-mists-legendary-backpacks-ascended-salvaging-and-more/

Guild Missions, as we have announced this week, will be getting a lot of love so to align with the new guilds structure coming with Heart of Thorns. I’m personally very excited for this! There’s a blog post here with much more info:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-mission-changes-and-improvements/

We’re serious about delivering quality, challenging encounters with our raid content, and as Steven said in our announcement of Raids, we have 3 raid wings being developed, the first of which will become available shortly after HoT launch. These raids are going to be intense, and ask of players not just their time, but their skill.

Don’t just take my word for it, this weekend we’re allowing you to play our content as part of the Beta Weekend Event. We’ve spent a lot of time and poured a lot of love into this content, and simply cannot wait for players to get their hands on it.

Good, now how about removing that 5 man buff limit cap so all classes can participate in raids as opposed to needing:

2 phalanx strength warriors (perma 25 might, 170 all stat banners),

2 persisting flames ele (perma fury, permanent fire field with lava font),

2 chronomancers (alacrity and quickness)

2 frost spirit/spotter rangers

2 Heralds (50% boon duration increase for protection, quickness, and might uptimes on your group).

That leaves reaper, scrapper, and daredevil out.

And you might want to start balancing the classes’ large utility/DPS disparity in PvE without the constant hamstring of PvP preventing any meaningful changes to this crap of “WARRIOR/ELE/ELE/GUARD/THIEF ONLY” that has been going for over 3 years.

Something tells me you’ll need your energy sigils instead of the night/day ones ;p

Anyones thanks to Chris Cleary for actually giving a heads up about character data and bank snapshots.

I had the unpleasant surprise last BWE about bank snapshots so it’s good they took feedback to heart and clarified the process.

Turkadactyl.5308:

Read what I said. The problem isn’t using math, the problem is that it’s like comparing apples and oranges. One mechanic is designed for burst and low sustain, and the other is for high sustain and low burst. A better choice for comparison for shatters would be backstab/heartseeker thieves or something else aimed at high burst. You may well end up with the same result, but then you’re comparing similar mechanics and so the point holds more stock.

Except backstab is a core PvE rotation of thief PvE sustained DPS lol.

PvE thief rotation is CnD>Backstab>Auto till reveal wears off>CnD>Backstab>Repeat.

And it does tons more sustained DPS than any mesmer rotation.

MESMER IS THE ONLY CLASS WHOSE MECHANIC ACTIVELY GIMPS ITS OWN SUSTAINED DPS.

You can forget about that. Since it was used for PU duelist builds, ad this game is balanced around 1v1 PvP QQ, you can rest assured no such buff will come to the skill.

Which it shouldn’t have anyways. 10 sec icd on 3 vulnerability stacks is pathetic. Basically only makes it useful when in a group of 5 people fighting in proximity.

You’re sacrificing a utility slot when an engineer can cap vuln by just throwing grenades, which is his DPS setup.

My necromancer alone can keep up 15+ stacks of vulnerability rotationally without any utility skills.

Come HoT with reaper you cap vulnerability in an instant.

The spirits die to a sneeze and won’t have 100% uptime on most content that is actually challenging anyways, due to the aoe/cleave spam and the spirits for some stupid reason are on the aggro table, making mobs attack them.

Anyone who thinks a 50% nerf to ice bow is gonna make ranger replace an elementalist is an idiot, ranger DPS is only above necro and mesmer. I’s about as mediocre as it gets and more importantly that’s peak idealized performance, not the practical DPS of trying to use 1h sword on archdiviner or mossman.

It is not very viable in PvE. It is a glorified portal bot for speed clears (the mesmer doesn’t even fight, he just runs portal to the next location) and come HoT all you will do is a gimmick quickness/alacrity sharing build that will do even less DPS than the current meta build (which is horrendous DPS already).

Thief is plenty PvE oriented, it has one of the highest single target damage builds, has the best stealth skips/stealth rezzing and the highest blind uptime of all classes along with being the best interrupt class thanks to head shot.

Meteor shower is in line for a nerf as well anyways, with large hitbox bosses probably coming to raids it’s gonna get the nerf bat.

Mega Skeleton.8259:

Zenith.7301:

Hexalot.8194:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Well, the wiki isn’t updated yet.

Currently the axe does 238 damage every 0.95 seconds. With a 10% buff, this amounts to 262 per hit, or 267 DPS. At 2 × 7 vulnerability per hit, this comes to 14.7 stacks of vulnerability sustained.

Life Blast does 345 damage within 600 range, and hits every 1.4 seconds. This comes to about 246 DPS. With unyielding blast, this comes to 14.3 stacks of vulnerability sustained.

This is… interesting. Rending claws now does more damage than life blast at any range. Unyielding Blast pierces, but Rending Claws basically bypasses any defense that isn’t a straight up block.

If anything, I’d say that axe is actually a decent weapon now.

In actual practice, the above isn’t true. If traited correctly, you can currently achieve 100% crit rate with life blast, which means its actual DPS will always be much higher than anything Axe can do.

He can pull up decimate defenses. 50% crit chance on top of your berzerker’s 45% crit chance+ fury is 100% without deathly perception.

So a reaper will indeed have 100% crit chance on axe.

Doesn’t change the fact that the axe is the crappiest ranged weapon out of all PvE classes, with one of the lowest DPS and no cleaving/group utility whatsoever.

No group utility? Vulnerability is even more important than maintaining might stacks, yes there are plenty of sources of it but I often see it not maxed out. I don’t think enough people stress this point and focus only on how many might stacks you can bring.

I was messing around with axe in my fotms last night and since I play hybrid, my condition duration brought the vuln up to 13 seconds, so I could actually maintain 25 if that’s all I did (which I wouldn’t do for obvious reasons). But even with good comps, I frequently see vuln sitting far too low at like 8-15 stacks. I’m going to try playing tonight focusing on making sure that vuln is always above 20 stacks, and see how smoothly the run goes when someone is dedicated to watching out for it. I always notice how bosses just melt when stacks are well maintained so I expect good results. As a hybrid build I have a unique opportunity to try it, because of my long non-damaging condition durations and variety of conditions I bring.

I imagine, at least because of my lower investment in auto attack damage that a sacrifice in personal DPS will be more than made up for across the group if I watch vulnerability closely.

It bothers me how much people focus on getting their leet ice bow freezes off but don’t pay as much attention to things like vuln.

Going to try slapping a sigil of vuln on it too, since that should be cheap, but if I don’t need or like it I’ll throw force on there. Either way, I’m happy to have a good reason to keep this axe in my bag now. I think there’s no reason not to bring it for fights where melee is too much of a liability. As power or hybrid.

A single ranger with storm spirit is gonna slap 15 permanent vulnerability stacks on a boss. Warrior/Ele/Mesmer will fill up the rest.

Vulnerability is stupidly abundant and by no means this great contribution a necro brings.

Photinous.4628:

While I agree with you for PvP, I really think buffs like this are what ranger needs to bring its DPS up to where ele and thief is in PvE. The quickness + 25 might achievable from this buff really beefs up ranger DPS in dungeons and fractals to a level where I actually feel like I’m contributing to the group damage wise.

Um, in any dungeon you have a PSEA warrior might capping for you and an ele fury capping, and a mesmer/guardian providing quickness.

This patch did virtually zero for PvE rangers besides giving pets condi damage, which is such a marginal increase to a pet who makes only 10-17% of your DPS.

I only miss old PU in the labyrinth on Silverwastes lol.

Right now I’ll just go back to tossing coins on a wishing well for a dev epiphany where my PvE experience can stop being black balled by PvP balance.

And hopefully the pvp crybabies won’t see it nerfed to the ground because of the amount of counterplay the reaper slow animations have.