Guild Wars 2

lol, you mean the backstab you do with no animations or tells the opponent can see because you are invisible?

And you can’t do backstab from range? Are you a moron? Backstab animation into steal is a ranged backstab.

Thief and warrior both have defensive abilities that allow them to melee, either via blind spam or target drops from stealth or healing signet and plate armor.

Ranger melee defensive boils down to signet of stone every 60 seconds. Then he dies.

Got killed by a thief? Well join the large line of classes that get farmed by thief unless you’re an engineer.

Jerus.4350:

Zenith.7301:

A meta not involving just warriors and guardians clearly could not be tolerated in the overall design of the game.

Now you can play your ele with all the risks and hazards of a cloth class with 10k base HP for the same results of the warrior/guardian master classes.

Wait, I can maintain 18-21 stacks of might and perma fury while outDPSing almost every other profession as a guard? Crazy, things I didn’t know…

/mourn FGS for sure, but I think I’ll still want an Ele or two in my groups for the other things they provide along with their high DPS.

Might and fury stacking isn’t exclusive to ele. You can run an offensive guardian spec in most content far better than tank guardian and provide a good amount of might stacks and 2 warriors can easily load you up on the rest.

At the rate most bosses die to a zerker group you don’t even need perma fury, FGJ from 2 warriors is more than enough time to burst down 2 bosses and especially with an inspiration signet from a mesmer available.

Ele was mostly popular because of how strong FGS was. Frostbow is pretty good still though.

Mitigation has never been equal to full avoidance in any pvp game.

Look at WoW. There’s a reason mages dominated all ranged classes, and that’s because if you can completely avoid damage with kiting/CC tools it’s much better than eating 50-70% of it with only 30-40% removed via facetank mechanisms.

SkiTz.4590:

This will probably make rangers one of the most useless classes to bring in a dung lol..

All they have going for them is freaking spotter… outside of that, ranger brings nothing to the table in a dung/frac… RIP..will stick to using my ranger as a machine gun sniper in WvW lol

Regardless of the patch nothing much was going to change for fractals. The truth is that fractal scaling at 50 does favor the heavy classes. Things like dredge and mossman/archdiviner melee simply do too much damage to light/medium armor classes to be efficient in melee.

And with FGS basically slaughtered, eles will join Rangers and Engineers and Necromancers now that fractal 50 ads in groupfinder will say “Heavies Only” instead of “Heavy or ele only”.

Just get in a dungeon guild that doesn’t mind you doing fractals on a ranger or just have a little patience with groupfinder for that fractal 50 group to appear that doesn’t discriminate against non-heavy.

sirian.4981:

Grimezy.5679:

I disagree with OP, as a squishy Zerk Ele I really rely on my party. I know straight away depending on what classes we have whether I can use my Zerk armour or whether I need to add in some tank.

With some practice zerker gear is almost always going to be your best choice.

Good luck meleeing mossman or archdiviner on fractal 50 without guardian protection and aegis rotation.

Zerker ele is a completely group dependent spec. I’ve been in far too many dungeon groups where I watch complacent conjure eles go down faster than a sack of bricks every time because the party comp is not tailored to support them or the guardians are not using aegis/blind properly.

A meta not involving just warriors and guardians clearly could not be tolerated in the overall design of the game.

Now you can play your ele with all the risks and hazards of a cloth class with 10k base HP for the same results of the warrior/guardian master classes.

RemiRome.8495:

Zenith.7301:

There was no difference in skill or effort required between classes

If you only care about completion and not killing her in 3 seconds this is true though.

edit: And aoe only oneshots pet if pet gets hit. inb4 that takes effort nerf warrior.
edit2: calling it a dps race was a nice touch. very funny.

“If the pet gets hit”
“Just call your pet back to you it’s not like you’re losing 30% of your damage in that forced downtime just because they can’t be bothered to design AI properly”

The fight only gets easier the more effective DPS you can apply. I certainly had the easier time completing my achievements on berserker setups than trying to do some stupid BM condi ranger attempt.

Or are you going to argue that the game’s encounters don’t get easier with effective application of burst.

Some of you should be plain forced to be invested in maining a ranger for over two years. In all the game formats. Not as a lol-throwaway youtube video, but actually as your main time investment in the game. Then we’ll see how magnanimous you are when playing a ranger or necromancer and pretending like the game isn’t experienced to varying degrees of enjoyment based on which class you picked to play.

I don’t want to nerf warriors I want you to shut the kitten up and stop trying to convince people that some classes are not much better off than others in most game formats and that the current game design favors some classes. By all means enjoy your warriors and guardians and thieves, just don’t be surprised when the other classes say the grass is greener because in fact the kittening grass on their side is all dried up and brown.

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

Rozbuska.5263:

Retaliation needs nerf for all multihitting skills not only flame jet. Just make it 1 hit per second per target and it will be fine for both sides.

What? really, nerf retaliation more? for wvw?
It has already been nerfed and now you want a nerf to promote the usage of flamethrower that gets buffed and now you are afraid that you do too much damage and the usage might kill you?

Really?

how about making flamthrower hit with the same ICD as you suggest for rataliation?
Sounds about right since retaliation is a boon used by All professions.

Considering the rapidfire changes to every profession i would say buff retaliation an make people learn to play a class and discover the actual game and combat tactics.

LOL Barrage in full berserker crits at most for 1.3k. I pretty much lose more of my total HP through retaliation than I actually take away from people.

And barrage is the only power spec aoe rangers truly have.

Retal pretty much unfairly owns Barrage/shortbow rangers and engineer grenades/flamethrower.

Meanwhile ele meteorshower and necro marks do far more damage but dont eat 50% of your health in retal.

Telling people to switch weapons till retal wears off is laughable. Retal is pretty much on all the time considering WvW is dominated by guardian/warrior based melee trains.

Ashen.2907:

Zenith.7301:

You mean this game isn’t p2w with precursors doubling in price from when I left at 600g now to 1200-1400g? lol

How can that be considered pay to win if the people asking 1200-1400g for a precursor are other players ?

Inflation is the new definition of pay to win ?

Also, how can acquisition of cosmetic items which provide no stat advantage over less expensive options be considered pay to win ?

Because endgame in this game is about skin acquisition, and legendaries also provide the flexibility of stat change without having to farm for a week to craft each different ascended item.

In WoW if I want a legendary weapon I do the hard mode raids to acquire the tokens. I don’t get it randomly gifted to me at an infinitesimally low chance by the game, gifting me months of grinding for free, or by spending hundreds of dollars in the gem store or well over 4 months grinding gold through boring zerg farm content instead of doing anything resembling skilled PvE such as high level fractals (good luck earning a legendary doing fractal runs or organized WvW play, might as well go zerg explorable dungeon speed runs and champ zerg trains).

I mean, in f2p models by your definition it’s not even pay to win. You have the option to grind your powers up, just like you have the option to farm for a GW2 legendary. But that doesn’t make the kittened gold grind any less worse and obvious as a blatant attempt to squeeze out gem sales.

Devata.6589:

Kraggy.4169:

saalle.4623:

.Every PayToPlay model FAILS eventually and turns to FTP

Some MMOs I play:

FFXI, launched ’02 – no pay-to-win, no sign of it doing so
WOW, launched ’04 – no pay-to-win, no sign of it doing so

How long is eventually in your book?

Now name a game released after WoW and that’s older as 2 years. Any game released over that 8 year period. Btw he talked about F2P not P2W.

Those games that released after WoW? They were kitten games. Really crappy games with really archaic concepts and poor implementation. Most MMO’s that fail today don’t have the quality of life features or polish WoW does. They just saw the MMO genre as a cash cow and tried to do more fast food type game sales.

So what if WoW’s had 9 years to develop? If you can’t release an MMO at WoW’s CURRENT standards, why should customers wait for you to develop your kittenty game through the years?

I don’t come out and compete with Comcast cable with my dial up company and then tell my customers that they should be reasonable and understand that Comcast had some years to develop in its current model. Customers don’t care, they’re paying and if they’re going to fork over cash, it’ll be over something better than the standard.

And in the case of post-WoW MMO’s, most of them were pathetic attempts at Everquest/early 2000 MMO nostalgia in an environment where most players don’t think of gaming as tedious and inconvenient time sinks.

Thieves have been farming pretty much any class that isn’t a good engineer or PU mesmer. They’re hardly the ones to whine about unfair 1v1 match ups.

In fact, thief and warrior have been the cause for all this condi meta because any class that tries to go power spec gets instagibbed by thief and warrior power specs.

Try being a power ranger or engineer or necromancer and running into a warrior or thief and then come back and tell me everything’s OK.

yolo swaggins.2570:

Zenith.7301:

yolo swaggins.2570:

Zenith.7301:

dancingmonkey.4902:

Zenith.7301:

TrOtskY.5927:

if they had to run away to reset then who cares, you won anyway.

Thievs ARE supposed to be a nuisance tho, you do understand?

You didn’t win. They reset the fight and since nobody can outrun a thief they can just come back shortly after to finish you off.

If your okay with this, and keep defending these professions in an irrational 1v1 comparison, then you have to accept the silliness that is the OP of the 1v1 discussion of necro versus warrior.

1v1 balance isn’t trivial in this game. In spvp it happens all the time, and in WvW thieves are flooding that format for the very reason that a thief can pretty much camp most professions 1v1 and whichever spec they can’t kill they easily can harass or run away from.

I’m ok with thief spike and control and sword evade spam, but their escapes need a nerfbat. If you make a mistake, you need to pay for those mistakes instead of getting all those free get out of jail cards to keep resetting until the fight goes in your favor because you ran your opponent out of cooldowns while your class doesn’t have nearly as long cooldowns.

WvW is not meant for 1v1 though. And secondly, that is how the thief was designed. It was built for 1v1s with excellent mobility in combat. But in zergs it is usually rallybait. It is designed as intended.

Lastly, If a thief is harassing you and keeps resetting, go into a tower or whatever and spec for more damage. The next time that thief attacks you, they will die faster.

Yeah, no, that’s not what thief was designed for. Because venom share thief is still a potent group player. Thief was designed to scout. Necromancers were meant to be the chasers (and surprise, they’re pretty crap at it).

Spec more damage lol, so the thief can crit a backstab on you for 9k on top of a mug.

Venomshare is not a viable support role for the thief. You are required to have a highly coordinated group, full line of venoms for the heavy traiting to count and the player themselves have to survive while being kitten out of condition removal and stunbreaks. As squishy as the profession is, they need to spec for some surviability or be hardcore at positioning and dodging.

Just about every weaponset (but mainly x/p) provides enough support that venoms are better off replaced by tools to keep the thief from being rallybait… imho. X/P with head shot and BP, S/D with boon removal and stuns, SB for blast finisher spam and d/d for downing key targets are great methods of support the thief has available and in the right hands would not need venoms to provide added support.

In fact, Caltrops provides way more support than all the venoms combined. Its on a much shorter cooldown and provides an aoe bleed and cripple that makes it harder for enemies to escape which in turn makes them easier targets for groups. It also ticks Signet of Malice per pulse per target which helps keep the thief alive a little longer.

That is just one example, though.

That’s the whole point of venomshare, to play it with a shortbow and good positioning.

I mean, in WvW any fight over 3-4 people you should be going shortbow because cluster bomb and choking gas on top of the bouncing autoattack will do so much more for your group than hitting 1-3 targets out of 10 targets with your melee weapon.

ulcimql.2516:

the quickest way to fix s/f is to put at least a 1/2 second cast time on obsidian flesh and call it a day. instant burst is one thing but having an uncounterable ultimate defense skill better than anything else in the game is definitely the main reason s/f can be considered op. instead of the cast time one could also just let it work the same way as endure pain. anything works as long as it does not make the player completely immune to all incoming effects.

LOL obsidian flesh has a 50 sec cd, on an offhand that basically removes a lot of your burst (no fire grab, so there goes all of your aoe burst).

Can’t believe the amount of pathetic idiocy I’m reading on this thread.

I mean, backstab is kittening invisible it’s not like you can reliably dodge that either, and most classes don’t even have enough vigor to afford to dodge the constant warrior hammer stunlock.

The difference between scepter ele and a thief is the scepter ele has huge cooldowns to do the burst a thief can do way more often.

Good for you, you can escape with fiery greatsword, every 180 seconds. The thief can escape whenever he can lay down a blackpowder and heartseek through it, about every 8 seconds.

The thief can steal boons, whereas the ele cannot.

More importantly, ele scepter autoattack SUCKS. It’s not just bad, it’s pretty terrible. An air scepter channel, supposedly the scepter’s strongest autoattack, still does less DPS total in its 3 second channel than an instant thief mainhand sword autoattack. And thief mainhand sword autoattack isn’t even the strongest ingame, warriors take the cake for ridiculous autoattack damage.

So if you nerf lightning strike to not be instant, you need to raise scepter autoattack by a metric ton to make up for the utter lack of sustained damage.

A scepter ele misses his burst (of which there’s more than lightning strike, you need arcane missile to land as well, and landing a fire grab is even worse), and he’s out of commission for about 30 seconds until his skills recharge. The thief and warrior both can burst as often as every 12 seconds.

And let’s not mention the fact that an ele to do reliable burst, needs to go glass at about 13k hp or less, without 6+ second immunity stances to chain together or a metric ton of cc like a warrior or the defense of stealth.

And this is burst, that unlike a warrior’s kittened earthshaker or whirlwind or 100b/new arcing slice only hits 1 target, while thief and warrior can do aoe damage on their bows while the ele is stuck with a weapon that has virtually no viable AoE besides phoenix (if you mention dragon’s tooth, the most easily dodged skill ever, I will slap you).

The lack of Frost Spirit won’t change much if you’re running regular speed runs instead of min max anyways. Just take Quickening Zephyr instead while they fix the kitten spirit.

With the incoming patch we’ll also be gaining more damage than we lose via predator’s onslaught and not having to trait to get the active benefit from signet of the wild, a big enough damage boost.

Losing frost spirit is no reason to say as the person I quoted that the ranger is not worth running over a guardian anymore. It was never the case that running a ranger was worth it over running another guardian or warrior anyways, or the even superior thief and conjure ele.

If you’re playing the ranger it’s because you enjoy the class and don’t mind putting in way more effort to achieve what a warrior does. Nobody will kick you from a group; I’ve been doing fractal 50’s every day and if I don’t get into a group it’s because it’s a “heavies only” group, which doesn’t care whether you have spotter or frost spirit.

thefantasticg.3984:

Stopped running it now.

Just got done with my Ranger ascended. Now time to start on my Guardian because I don’t think the upcoming feature patch changes are going to make it worth bringing the Ranger over the guardian to dungeons or high level fractals especially with the FS nerf… GG, Anet.

Even with FS Ranger spot in the meta was hardly vital. It was just easier to bring another guardian or ele or any class really that isn’t a necro or engineer.

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

Necro you just walked in a circle spamming condis, wasn’t very difficult. Ranger you could just range in a circle, I didn’t do it on ele but I’m pretty sure people just FGS’d her or kited her in a circle B^)

The mechanics weren’t gimmicky, you just had trouble figuring them out apparently.

Yeah, ranger operating at half efficiency was a totally a legit mechanic. There was no difference in skill or effort required between classes you are kittening genius.

Kiting in a circle, who would have thought of that in an encounter with a rotating hourglass telegraph. Thanks for missing the point.

Silberfisch.3046:

Zenith.7301:

RedStar.4218:

There was a lot of complaints regarding Aetherblade Retreat because it was supposedly way too hard. I don’t know if Molten got it too because I didn’t pay any attention back then.

Battle for LA was, like a big chunk of LS1, a huge farm and Marionette was a great way to show how low the playerbase general level actually was.

It wasn’t way too hard. It was just badly designed with more imbalanced mobs and yet more mechanisms that favored warriors/guardians.

Silberfisch.3046:

Blaeys.3102:

[…]

As for rewards, I dont see a need to offer anything unique. This suggestion is more about wanting the experience and the challenge more than anything else.

Alternatively, they could offer a one-time achievement reward for finishing all of the 5-player instances in a season – a title or a skin that looked like a reward from the main story with a different color, possibly.

While the sense of achievement for having mastered something difficult will probably be enough for those who simply look for a chellenge, I think additional rewards might be a good idea to get more people to try it aside from the completionists and those looking for challenging content.

Of course, as I said, that is a two-sided sword because it will also invite complaints about something being too difficult – see liadri.

With that in mind, you are probably right, a one time achievement would be better and the idea of a repeatable for multiple rewards might be going too far.
Although that would be a step into the direction aof skill based prestige skins. Something quite a few people seem to be fond of.

Another post confusing “difficult” with badly designed.

Liadri was a dps race that one shot ranger pets. That’s kitten mechanics, period.

On my warrior i could bull’s rush, aoe fear the adds and finish liadri in one single knockdown with 100b>whirlwind.

On my thief all you needed was to spec into acrobatics and caltrops on dodge+ weakness/cripple removal on dodge and it was easymode infinite dodges.

Guardian was also fairly doable.

Classes like ranger/ele/necro had it far more difficult because of again, gimmicky mechanics and a really terrible camera view.

I’m afraid you missed the point I was trying to make. I was using Liadri as an example as to what happens on the forums if something shiny apparently can’t be obtained by everyone due to time limitations, perceived difficulty or whatever reason you can come up with.
I know the only trouble with Liadri basically was that you could get unlucky where the black orbs spawned and the rest was just learning the not-too-complicated pattern. And that some classes had a field day with her and others didn’t.

I wasn’t complaining about Liadri or promoting her as a good example of how challenging content should look like.
Maybe I should have made that clearer.

Fair enough.

RedStar.4218:

There was a lot of complaints regarding Aetherblade Retreat because it was supposedly way too hard. I don’t know if Molten got it too because I didn’t pay any attention back then.

Battle for LA was, like a big chunk of LS1, a huge farm and Marionette was a great way to show how low the playerbase general level actually was.

It wasn’t way too hard. It was just badly designed with more imbalanced mobs and yet more mechanisms that favored warriors/guardians.

Silberfisch.3046:

Blaeys.3102:

[…]

As for rewards, I dont see a need to offer anything unique. This suggestion is more about wanting the experience and the challenge more than anything else.

Alternatively, they could offer a one-time achievement reward for finishing all of the 5-player instances in a season – a title or a skin that looked like a reward from the main story with a different color, possibly.

While the sense of achievement for having mastered something difficult will probably be enough for those who simply look for a chellenge, I think additional rewards might be a good idea to get more people to try it aside from the completionists and those looking for challenging content.

Of course, as I said, that is a two-sided sword because it will also invite complaints about something being too difficult – see liadri.

With that in mind, you are probably right, a one time achievement would be better and the idea of a repeatable for multiple rewards might be going too far.
Although that would be a step into the direction aof skill based prestige skins. Something quite a few people seem to be fond of.

Another post confusing “difficult” with badly designed.

Liadri was a dps race that one shot ranger pets. That’s kitten mechanics, period.

On my warrior i could bull’s rush, aoe fear the adds and finish liadri in one single knockdown with 100b>whirlwind.

On my thief all you needed was to spec into acrobatics and caltrops on dodge+ weakness/cripple removal on dodge and it was easymode infinite dodges.

Guardian was also fairly doable.

Classes like ranger/ele/necro had it far more difficult because of again, gimmicky mechanics and a really terrible camera view.

Not a single encounter in this game has taken players more than a day to complete.

Spent 1.5 hours on a lv50 fractal only to get a ring.

I’m pretty sure if you have to dish out the metric ton of gold to have 70 AR and happen to level all the way from 1 to 50, fractal rings shouldn’t even be in the loot table for lv50 fractals.

And I should never come out empty handed out of a lv 50 fractal. 50 should be the reward for fractal skins/ascended chests.

Goldberg.4831:

While I may have had my ups and downs in the last 2 years of this game, and may not always agree on the changes within the game or the gem store. I have to say as a consumer and one who has tried a wide range of MMO’s (I get bored easy), Areanet has the best subscription model hands down. Thank you for respecting me as a gamer first and a consumer second. If you don’t believe me check out what Trion is doing to archeage, 15/dollars a month for patron status, and locking crafting mats behind the p2w store.

So let’s hear it for all those happy the b2p model.

You mean this game isn’t p2w with precursors doubling in price from when I left at 600g now to 1200-1400g? lol

You’re pathetically deluded, they just put in a metric ton of gold grinds that are a roundabout way of getting people to buy gems to convert to gold on their store.

All new skins on this game have not come from content but the gem store as well. I’m willing to bet this model makes them a lot more money.

Do you live on some basement? 15 bucks a month is chump change. 2 visits to McDonald’s by yourself will cost you more, and that’s money you crap down in a couple of hours as opposed to a sub game whose content you enjoy for thousands of hours.

You can already run rune of the traveler on mesmer and it’s pretty great. No need to use some kittenty focus in pvp, you can stick with a pistol.

yolo swaggins.2570:

Zenith.7301:

dancingmonkey.4902:

Zenith.7301:

TrOtskY.5927:

if they had to run away to reset then who cares, you won anyway.

Thievs ARE supposed to be a nuisance tho, you do understand?

You didn’t win. They reset the fight and since nobody can outrun a thief they can just come back shortly after to finish you off.

If your okay with this, and keep defending these professions in an irrational 1v1 comparison, then you have to accept the silliness that is the OP of the 1v1 discussion of necro versus warrior.

1v1 balance isn’t trivial in this game. In spvp it happens all the time, and in WvW thieves are flooding that format for the very reason that a thief can pretty much camp most professions 1v1 and whichever spec they can’t kill they easily can harass or run away from.

I’m ok with thief spike and control and sword evade spam, but their escapes need a nerfbat. If you make a mistake, you need to pay for those mistakes instead of getting all those free get out of jail cards to keep resetting until the fight goes in your favor because you ran your opponent out of cooldowns while your class doesn’t have nearly as long cooldowns.

WvW is not meant for 1v1 though. And secondly, that is how the thief was designed. It was built for 1v1s with excellent mobility in combat. But in zergs it is usually rallybait. It is designed as intended.

Lastly, If a thief is harassing you and keeps resetting, go into a tower or whatever and spec for more damage. The next time that thief attacks you, they will die faster.

Yeah, no, that’s not what thief was designed for. Because venom share thief is still a potent group player. Thief was designed to scout. Necromancers were meant to be the chasers (and surprise, they’re pretty crap at it).

Spec more damage lol, so the thief can crit a backstab on you for 9k on top of a mug.

dancingmonkey.4902:

Zenith.7301:

TrOtskY.5927:

if they had to run away to reset then who cares, you won anyway.

Thievs ARE supposed to be a nuisance tho, you do understand?

You didn’t win. They reset the fight and since nobody can outrun a thief they can just come back shortly after to finish you off.

If your okay with this, and keep defending these professions in an irrational 1v1 comparison, then you have to accept the silliness that is the OP of the 1v1 discussion of necro versus warrior.

1v1 balance isn’t trivial in this game. In spvp it happens all the time, and in WvW thieves are flooding that format for the very reason that a thief can pretty much camp most professions 1v1 and whichever spec they can’t kill they easily can harass or run away from.

I’m ok with thief spike and control and sword evade spam, but their escapes need a nerfbat. If you make a mistake, you need to pay for those mistakes instead of getting all those free get out of jail cards to keep resetting until the fight goes in your favor because you ran your opponent out of cooldowns while your class doesn’t have nearly as long cooldowns.

Jerus.4350:

Zenith.7301:

Jerus.4350:

GW2 is the first MMO I’ve played that is this focused on solo content that’s for sure.

It’s not solo content. LS is a one time deal, with pretty much nonexistent rewards.

This game is either casino/trading post wars 2, or you do the daily dungeon tour doing the same tired skipping and wall hugging kitten.

I mean, what kind of kittened up endgame content consists of exploiting broken game mechanics that allow AI to be trivialized?

Whatever happened to gw1’s AI spreading on AoE? What about condition spreads, boon steals, CC?

Instead what you get is sacks of HP with shoddy telegraphs and badly tuned autoattack damage.

The bolded is pretty much every game I’ve played. First you barely beat it. Then you learn to do it regularly, then you find out tricks to make it faster. Really nothing new there for me.

I do agree there could be a lot more interesting mechanics though, just that abuse of AI and what not is pretty much normal and to be expected.

As for badly tuned auto attack damage, I think that’s actually done pretty well. The idea was to make all builds viable, they did that, but with that it means that glass cannons can work, if they simply upped auto attack damages and what not then the unavoidable attacks would start to take a toll and possibly make glass cannon setups not possible and go against what they set out to do.

There are 2 things that I find a bit disappointing about the dungeons in this game. The lack of required control/support, and the way they handled conditions. Control/support is important already but it could be so much more. I look at a fight like the Robot in COE and think “man why don’t more bosses have boons and require stripping?” Defiance is IMO overused, we could benefit from some play with how that works, instead of one CC and it goes immune instead have it 5 stacks up and 5 stacks down for some bosses, so through the fight we have to manage and intelligently utilize our CCs to stop the big attacks 5 times, if we screw up we may have to knock off the defiance to get that ability back. Just throwing stuff out but still, yeah mechanics could be better, but it’s pretty normal to abuse AI, it’s what makes things fun to do more than a handful of times, it’s what allows us to get better and better rather than just doing it over and over.

/shrug late night rambling

Not really every game. If I’m doing heroic blackfuse in WoW or Garrosh I don’t get to ignore most of the fight mechanics. Practice and consistency may get to the point we trivialize it because we learned the encounter, but we never get to use something on the scale of GW2 wall-hugging.

Autoattack damage also heavily discriminates against non-heavies, it’s why you see so much discrimination against medium/light armor. Take mossman or hierophant on fractal 50. Their autoattacks will one shot a berk ele without aegis spam up, but will only take out half of a warrior’s hp pool. Dredge and Ascalon fractals mean if you’re not spamming blind while wall hugging, the autoattacks of 2 mobs hitting you as a non-warrior/guardian will pretty much insta-down you.

Making CC more required would only really solidify warrior/guardian/thief meta, as those are the classes with most CC to begin with while necromancer and ranger have the least CC’s and nothing would change.

unlucky.9285:

I don’t think all the self healing skills should work in deathshroud.. a minion master is already a pain in the backside with its health generation. I would say the minor ones would be fine like heal on hit and well siphons as a start

Minion master only exists maybe in spvp.

My ranger when my barrage is tickling people for 1.3k crit while a meteor shower is hitting people for 4k and my Barrage costs me 50% of my HP as soon as there’s a Guardian around, which is everywhere.

TrOtskY.5927:

if they had to run away to reset then who cares, you won anyway.

Thievs ARE supposed to be a nuisance tho, you do understand?

You didn’t win. They reset the fight and since nobody can outrun a thief they can just come back shortly after to finish you off.

ICD’s don’t make any sense on any of the spirits with the exception of the Stone Spirit, and in the case of the Stone Spirit they should just up the protection uptime to 5-6 seconds.

To be honest, most rangers were not even taking more than Frost Spirit, because the Sun spirit is made obsolete by having a guardian or ele in the group.

And spirits don’t even compete with banners, which are also invulnerable and can be moved without needing a trait.

I’d rather they make the sun spirit provide might or fury procs so the ranger can also fill a boon stacking niche for the group.

Of course, the ideal would be for spirits to be even less boring and for them to borrow from the gw1 implementation of actually changing a combat environment’s rules.

Either way, especially with the change to signets most rangers will just bring sic em and signet of the wild alongside frost spirit (not nerfed). If frost spirit remains useless they can just replace it with Quickening Zephyr.

Frost Spirit wouldn’t be the first thing they made obsolete (like when they nerfed BM traits and moved pet swap quickness up and gave BM rangers on the adept level a useless trait like quickness for pet when teh ranger is downed, lol).

Rangers have been paying in PvE and WvW for all the crying in spvp about spirit rangers (and then warriors and s/d thieves came and wiped them out of the spvp meta).

Jerus.4350:

GW2 is the first MMO I’ve played that is this focused on solo content that’s for sure.

It’s not solo content. LS is a one time deal, with pretty much nonexistent rewards.

This game is either casino/trading post wars 2, or you do the daily dungeon tour doing the same tired skipping and wall hugging kitten.

I mean, what kind of kittened up endgame content consists of exploiting broken game mechanics that allow AI to be trivialized?

Whatever happened to gw1’s AI spreading on AoE? What about condition spreads, boon steals, CC?

Instead what you get is sacks of HP with shoddy telegraphs and badly tuned autoattack damage.

That’s what you get when you give a class a stunbreak that has a stunbreaker that breaks stuns twice, teleports you, and clears conditions all in one package, on top of multiple ways to stealth at little cost.

Teleports+ stealth+ burst makes the class a roaming king. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t the best at 1v1 because whatever counters it has 1v1 it can easily escape from and quickly come back to harass or land a finishing kill when it’s more opportune.

Escapes and target drops/immunities are the strongest form of mitigation in this game, and it’s why warriors and thieves are so good at roaming. They can get in, land some easy burst and CC, and then get out as quickly as they got in.

A necro? Get screwed if you get focused prepare to be pinballed to death. Guardian can’t run away either and ranger gets destroyed by roots and stuns as rangers have complete garbage for condi removal and stunbreak skills.

dancingmonkey.4902:

Sunshine.4680:

Big servers just blob stack, there is no strategy other than who can gather the biggest blob and overwhelm everyone. Blob on all the areas so much that nobody can stop it. Rangers aren’t useless in wvw.. their pets are.

Thread title:

“Fix ranger pets in PvE already.”

I am guilty too. I got into someones off topic WvW tangent. Lets keep it on topic.

WvW is part of PvE progression and endgame. It’s specifically a hybrid and part of the reason why the PvE ruleset applies to it instead of the spvp ruleset.

The issues for pets in PvE are the same issues as in WvW. You have a game with damage designed around being avoided rather than facetanked, and pets are only capable of facetanking unless your definition of avoidance is have pets sitting beside you cutting your DPS by 30%.

Pets don’t cleave like a warrior or guardian, with just a 3 target limit wimpy autoattack on the drake, pets need to be traited to benefit from boons you gain, otherwise they can’t reliably gain stuff like stability to not be pinballed all over the place.

And the fact that our damage delivery is delayed by virtue of having pets and the resulting AI, we are also the one class without competitive, on demand instant burst so our power specs suffer on top of the class being dead in a group engagement once signet of stone is blown.

Spirits for some reason can be attacked, while banners are invulnerable and provide more powerful effects.

The strongest classes in PvE and WvW are those that can cleave well and stack boons on the group while having effective ways of mitigating/avoiding damage for the froup. The ranger doesn’t have any of those in which he isn’t outdone by another class.

Rangers and Necromancers are on the same boat. Poor cleaving, little boons to provide for the group, and their minions don’t cleave either on top of having all the limitations of a pet.

Sunshine.4680:

Big servers just blob stack, there is no strategy other than who can gather the biggest blob and overwhelm everyone. Blob on all the areas so much that nobody can stop it. Rangers aren’t useless in wvw.. their pets are.

I’m sorry but that’s just not true. People stack guardians, warriors, and elementalists for a reason.

Warriors, guardians, and elementalists all provide the most amount of uptime of boons in the game, have amazing cleaving and crowd control capacity, and have group survival skills that far outshine any other class.

And to top it off, all of those stack well with each other. Having more of one guardian or elementalist or warrior never becomes redundant.

dancingmonkey.4902:

Zenith.7301:

dancingmonkey.4902:

Would you prefer to go back to the old way? And have to physically revive them like a downed player?

The old way also had greatsword rangers melting people in beta before they nerfed all ranger power spec weapons to hell.

There’s no trading to be done, pets are weak survivability wise and they need buffing on top of gear scaling and cleaving since those pets make up about 30%+ of our damage.

The old way of pet swapping upon death compared to having to revive pets had nothing to do with the greatsword, so I do not know what you hope to accomplish with your off topic tangent.

You do realize you came into this thread with the false dichotomy where we have to choose between this crappy death penalty system or go back to reviving pets, right?

The whole point of that “off topic tangent” was telling you that if you’re going to propose reverting to an old state, I will gladly trade rezzing a useless pet if it means rangers can have their big damage back since at that point they didn’t even need the pet to kill things, because the greatsword was that good.

It’s a silly point because the obvious answer is that both pet implementations were WRONG.

Players in beta begged the developers to not make pets a mechanic for the class, the developers ignored that feedback, and what we have today is a halfbaked mechanic that has crippled the class in every aspect of the game except perhaps solo leveling (an aspect in the grand scheme of things that is unimportant).

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

They should fix the ai of all pets first. That also includes creatures such as minions, and other related pets. They stand around doing nothing way too often.

With the amount of pets and different skills there are on pets and minions, don’t bet on it.

They barely have the resources and time to push out a balance patch every 5 months for the classes themselves, you don’t want to see what it would turn into if they had to balance all the minions too.

Best WvW change for pets was the change to spiders, but ranged pets still suffer the 900 range handicap and they can’t successuflly path and shoot from keep walls and their projectiles get bodyblocked unlike some classes whose projectiles cleave or pierce.

Sagat.3285:

Evade command ………

Evade command will do nothing in WvW where aoe is pretty much spammed.

And why should I have to not only worry about twitch dodging crap myself, but having to issue a command at the same type for my pet to do so as well?

dancingmonkey.4902:

Would you prefer to go back to the old way? And have to physically revive them like a downed player?

The old way also had greatsword rangers melting people in beta before they nerfed all ranger power spec weapons to hell.

There’s no trading to be done, pets are weak survivability wise and they need buffing on top of gear scaling and cleaving since those pets make up about 30%+ of our damage.

Lazze.9870:

Zenith.7301:

Chokolata.1870:

Rangers are getting a significant boost for PvE come next patch. Removal of the SotBM and introduction of predators onslaught

Big deal the pet will still be dead most of the time unless you force yourself to use drakes.

Funny.

If your pet is dead all the time, it’s all on you. A good ranger doesn’t have any problems running around with felines most of the time.

Yeah right I’d love to see your streams in WvW or fractal 50 with a pet being alive 100%.

Chokolata.1870:

Rangers are getting a significant boost for PvE come next patch. Removal of the SotBM and introduction of predators onslaught

Big deal the pet will still be dead most of the time unless you force yourself to use drakes.

His damage will still not be warrior or thief level and his group utility still amounts to spotter and frost spirit.

Neve.7134:

So you already have got ascended armors and weapons on all your characters? Sounds nice eh?
If you don’t, then you don’t have all maxed armors and weapons and also, if “you don’t care about ascended things” it’s not a problem of the game.

No, we don’t care about mindless zerg PvE where you stand and spam autoattack at some big sack of HP, which is what dragonite ores are all about.

Loyo.8526:

Starting from top.

Warrior
Thief
Elementalist
Ranger
Guardian
Mesmer
Engineer

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Guardian is the backbone of every PvE group. It virtually trivializes any encounter and is pretty close to warrior in its DPS spec.

Don’t know what you’re smoking but putting a guardian behind a ranger is hilarious.

Guardian is the master class in this game. Every GvG or WvW setting HAS to have them, as does any spvp team needing a bunker, and in fractal 50 not having a guardian around makes things a lot more difficult.

All these complaints are too late into the development cycle for anything to change.

Remember they do these skillbars to give an illusion of feedback consideration, but the fact that this game doesn’t have a test server clearly shows what weight is given to player feedback on incoming changes. Very little.

Development in this game as it pertains classes is not collaborative with players at all. If it were, ranger and necromancer wouldn’t be in the garbage bin for more than 2 years.

And quite frankly, has anyone noticed how you only see Karl in skillbar whereas before you would see 3 designers before? I’m pretty sure the balance team is just made up of Karl by now, at least in terms of workload.

The dagger change is a joke. In PvE most mob pulls are 4-5+ mobs. In WvW most groups are 10+ players.

To give you an idea, warrior mainhand axe hits more targets AND outdamages necro dagger by a good bit, as does guardian greatsword auto chain.

Moreover, while the thief dagger change is also kind of a joke, the thief has the option in pve of running pistol whip in their swap option to cleave and use mainhand dagger for boss single target.

The necromancer’s power options are literally all single target (2 targets is nothing either), and the necromancer has no ranged attack options outside life blast since the axe mainhand is the one ranged weapon in game with a miserable 600 range for no reason whatsoever and a weak autoattack still.

Power necro’s only aoe comes from a single well and DS drain life. It’s pathetic in a game where AoE damage rules everything.

And what does the class get in exchange for lacking AoE power spec options? Nothing, because their single target is no better than a thief or warrior or elementalist.

After this feature pack, nothing will have changed. It will still be Warrior, Thief, and Guardian land with the occasional Ele mixed in as well. Necro and Ranger will still be in a bad spot, and for the Engineer nobody wants them still in PvE.

2 kitten years.

Still no cleaving on any pet besides drake.

Pet power hasn’t been scaled up to ascended item upgrade levels.

No AoE damage reduction.

Non-drakes having too low hp for the damage some bosses do with a simple autoattack.

Still that ridiculous 45 second cooldown death penalty in a format that seems tailor made to murder pets.

Silly cast times on pet skills like 3 second roar on a jungle stalker. What other class needs to cast for 3 seconds just to apply a boon to the group.

Do something to make pets not total garbage in PvE and WvW.

nearlight.3064:

Zenith.7301:

No, the problem is they hybridized ranger weapons and made them useless as a result.

Both the axe and shortbow step on each other’s toes. The axe auto is power based yet the other skills are condition skills.

The shortbow auto has a power and condition attack mix as well, which makes optimizing the weapon pretty much impossible.

It’s why longbow and the swords bear better results for what you use them. All the stats you gear for go directly to the skills.

A few things
1. Sword is kind of a hybrid weapon too
2. I hope you’re not implying that longbow based power builds are considered good for high level pvp, because that is incorrect.
3. The axe and shortbow are far from useless. Celestial is a thing you know which makes hybrid great. You can even run a rabid or carrion set up with axe or shortbow and do wonders with it. They are not useless. The axe auto on some builds is less useful, but in two weeks it will serve a very clear and good purpose..

I’m talking from a numbers perspective. Don’t dwell on what they are. Just think about scaling with gear.

A berzerker in full ascended is getting more bang from that gear on their sword/longbow/axe offhand than on a mainhand axe or crossbow, where a portion of the skill borrows in its formula from a stat they don’t have as much of.

It’s also part of why warriors are so powerful. Not only are the base values of their skills really high, but the weapons they use are highly specialized. A greatsword or mainhand axe or hammer all perfectly scale on a power spec.

Splitting power from condition damage was a terrible idea. It heavily punishes hybrid skills and weapons. And celestial is pretty worthless for PvE, and you will do pretty garbage damage in group play in WvW where specialization is more desired.

No, the problem is they hybridized ranger weapons and made them useless as a result.

Both the axe and shortbow step on each other’s toes. The axe auto is power based yet the other skills are condition skills.

The shortbow auto has a power and condition attack mix as well, which makes optimizing the weapon pretty much impossible.

It’s why longbow and the swords bear better results for what you use them. All the stats you gear for go directly to the skills.

Cripple doesn’t work on most bosses so I don’t know what you mean by 15% more damage in any content that matters.

Some classes stack well, like ele and warrior and guardian. Others like thief and ranger and mesmer are completely worthless to have more than one of.

Rangers would disagree.

It is, he actually traited into might on shatters lol. The poor guy will be disappointed when he finds out how poorly his retal traits work.

He has virtually no protection and a single stun breaker. And he’s using a useless torch offhand, so he’s sacrificing about 9-10 stacks of bleeds from illusionary duelist and about 3k from the unload for some kittenty 3 stacks of confusion and 1 more from a long kitten cd prestige.

He has no stun outside a signet, which he would have with an offhand pistol to chase or stop heals or cc multiple opponents, and no effective way to fight sidestepping ranged opponents like a P/D thief. Staff and scepter projectiles are so slow, you can’t chase with them without a pistol offhand and it will take him forever to ramp up conditions.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

For staff clones inheriting Illusionary Elasticity, I think people are less concerned about that because they figure that’s the way it always should have worked and this is more of a bug fix than a genuine buff.

Doesn’t matter how you perceive it. It significantly improves performance that was good already, so it’s a buff.

They want us to be defensive with conditions and support through them, but weakness and blind and cripple don’t work on dungeon bosses so they’ll never really be up to par with protection and stability and regen which work EVERYWHERE.

Moreover, the amount of boon removal abilities is very, very tiny compared to the amount of condition cleansing ones.

While guardians are farting boons for their team constantly, only a 40 sec cd necro well or a mesmer null field can sort of scratch that boon train. Nothing else. Ranger can’t group rip boons, neither can’t thief, neither can warrior or engineer.

Boons>>>>>>>>Conditions in defensive terms. Hell, even in offensive terms boons are great because stability is by far the greatest damage increase in group PvP on top of protection since it affords very high uptime.

Black Box.9312:

Zenith.7301:

Black Box.9312:

Condition application on autoattack is still a terrible thing, and this is a terrible idea.

You can take it out when you nerf the condition cleanse of guardian stacking and ele water fields and warrior constant cleansing and immunities.

You should have tried playing a necro before they got dhuumfire and terror there was a reason nobody used them.

Pretty much also the reason condi ele hasn’t existed, because when condi application is cooldown based it can’t possibly keep up with the current state of cleanses and burst.

I play both a guardian and an ele. I know exactly how much heavily defensive traiting it takes to acquire that level of condition removal, and let me tell you that it takes far more investment than a simple autoattack with some condition damage gear.

As do I, and guess what my D/D ele kittens on any necro any day any time while roaming. Guess what gives my ele a hard time?

Hint, it’s not the condition specs, but rather the kittened thieves and hammer warriors.

And my guardian happens to make the same investment and can afford to run in the melee trains, tanking metric tons of damage while still swinging autoattacks for 3-4k crits and whirling wraths for 6k+.

Good luck in GvG’s with your kittenty condi specs though when you got 4-5 guardians, 3-4 warriors, and several ele water fields chain cleansing all your conditions.

lol if I ever dared to run a grenade engineer half my health is gone from guardian retal in 2 grenade nukes. My power spec ranger in a barrage loses over half his health to the stupid guardians farting protection and stability and might all over while pinballing you with circle of warding and banish and warrior earthshakers.

Kontrolle.3514:

Lifestealer.4910:

WvW roaming will be deemed dead as well as all you will see is PU mesmers and P/D thieves ( you already see endless of this brain dead OP spec).

How is this any different to the situation now?
Its already 80-90% PU mesmers + condition thiefs.
Its almost as pathetic as those players that play those specs.

Really? Because I just roamed in TC and that 90% you said was actually hambow warriors and D/P thieves.

Any dueling spec is pathetic. Don’t go pretending like your hammer stunlock with 5-6k autoattacks or a 8-9k backstab and spammable stealth isn;t kittened either.

And unlike PU mesmer or P/D thief, D/P thief and warrior can actually chase and kill faster.

Hell, a decent engineer will crap all over a PU mesmer or P/D thief, and D/P thief completely hardcounters P/D.

Bunch of whiny power spec kittenes you all are, as if the WvW GvG trains weren’t made up of mostly power spec guardians and warriors and eles. Bunker condi classes can only roam while every godkitten power spec gets to enjoy teamplay and dominance in PvE as well.