I don’t think having a little consistency between class mechanics and counterplay warrants thieves getting any sort of buff. Initiative already ignores chilled for god knows what reason while other classes can be utterly crippled by it, ignoring interrupts as well is just icing on the double standard cake. It’s gimmicky, counterplay ignoring crap like that that makes everyone hate kitten like Healing Signet. It isn’t the fact that it’s a really good skill or that it’s hard to outplay that makes it aggravating, it’s that the opportunity to outplay that mechanic just flat out doesn’t even exist beyond the warrior completely kittening up. Initiative is the cooldown equivalent of Healing Signet.
Thief weapon skills are affected by chill, the time inbetween skill uses increases, you lose the time even if initiative is not affected a chilled thief can use less skills in the same timeframe than a thief without the chilled conditions.
In addition to that there are special effects hindering thieves while chilled, heartseeker will jump only half the distance for example.
LOL, as if chills didn’t affect other classes’ leaps, which are on much longer cooldowns than HS.
I love how thieves act like they’re the only glass cannon that will die if not allowed to go invulnerable.
Newsflash, any nonplate glass cannon dies in seconds. It’s not unique to thieves however much they like to pretend being super squishy relative to other classes that aren’t guardians/warriors/engineers.
Ele autoattacks need buffing anyways, especially water and earth attunement ones they’re terrible. Across all weapons.
It’s pathetic lightning hammer conjure is the only way for ele to deal high sustained damage comparable to a warrior or thief’s base weaponskill damage.
Also, raising ele to mesmer levels of HP will do a lot to open up viable builds for them as right now they can be 2 shot by warriors and thieves and mesmers in some builds that dont stack protection.
Some condi cleanse not tied to cantrips would also help.
Lower mist form/arcaneshield/armor of earth to 35 sec cd base. Ele shouldn’t need to go into evasive arcana and 20 points in water tree to live.
In turn nerf the easy self heal back to full of some ele specs the idea is that you would have access to mitigation, but no class, including the thief or warrior, should be able to constantly reset fights to disengage and heal so trivially.
If you are critically damaged for making mistakes, it should be really hard to recover.
They need to nerf the hardiness/hp reset of some bunkers, and bring down the burst/condi damage of some classes.
This game is an utter extreme of stacking on one or the other because quite frankly splitting between offense and defense as most classes will see you just as easily killed and unable to scratch others.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
What I find more broken in that video is that said thief interrupting you can do so 3-4 times in a row.
Most classes at best get 2 interrupts on 30+ sec cd’s.
Stun=Daze=knockdown=Launch all this effect make interupt
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stun
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Daze
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Knock_down
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/LaunchWarrior,Mesmer,Thief,Elementalist,Engineer etc can you interupted 4+ in a row no only Thief.
1) Learn the mechanics of this game
2)Now you are qualified to write on the forumLearn to not be stupid for once. All those classes in order to interrupt 3-4 times have to choose weapons that are only good for that, suck offensively, and in general those builds are not viable and have much longer cooldowns than a thief interrupting.
Tell me which viable ele spec can easily interrupt attack from range several times and still burst people down.
Thief has to choose offhand pistol and/or trait 30 into trickery, losing out on a ton of defense to do so. Your point is still moot. If you’re tired of being interrupted by a thief, grab some reflects. Instead of whining about a class, learn to counter them and build around that counter concept.
Oh poor thieves, having to choose their strongest offhand weapon.
All classes obviously have copious amounts of reflection and plenty of utility slots to fit it in place of the already mandatory utilities they need to survive since they dont get their burst and defense gifted to them on their weaponsets unlike black powder and backstab.
How about we ban you from playing thief and force you to play ele and mesmers and non-bunker rangers against thieves as your sole pvp experience. Let’s see how that “learn to counter” tune of yours last.
I guess people also learn to counter the absurd warriors signet too, somehow.
Funny enough, I play all 3 of those in PvP with much success. Ranger offhand axe has a traited 1200 range pull on a 12s CD with skill 5 being a very long reflect which can be manually canceled. I’ve also been playing a power staff mesmer who’s Phantasmal warlock hits enemies for up to 7k every 5 seconds with plenty of reflects, and my ele as a support S/F with projectile blocks and invuln. Thieves have never been a problem for me on those classes and it’s because I know how thieves work. I haven’t played my thief on a regular basis in several months due to the amount of QQ you get no matter what you play, but I’ll still defend the class, because it’s a major L2P issue.
Yes, it’s L2P. Ele/mesmer/power ranger are so well represented in all tiers of pvp.
For now I think I’m better off with L2Ignore
What I find more broken in that video is that said thief interrupting you can do so 3-4 times in a row.
Most classes at best get 2 interrupts on 30+ sec cd’s.
Stun=Daze=knockdown=Launch all this effect make interupt
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stun
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Daze
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Knock_down
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/LaunchWarrior,Mesmer,Thief,Elementalist,Engineer etc can you interupted 4+ in a row no only Thief.
1) Learn the mechanics of this game
2)Now you are qualified to write on the forumLearn to not be stupid for once. All those classes in order to interrupt 3-4 times have to choose weapons that are only good for that, suck offensively, and in general those builds are not viable and have much longer cooldowns than a thief interrupting.
Tell me which viable ele spec can easily interrupt attack from range several times and still burst people down.
Thief has to choose offhand pistol and/or trait 30 into trickery, losing out on a ton of defense to do so. Your point is still moot. If you’re tired of being interrupted by a thief, grab some reflects. Instead of whining about a class, learn to counter them and build around that counter concept.
Oh poor thieves, having to choose their strongest offhand weapon.
All classes obviously have copious amounts of reflection and plenty of utility slots to fit it in place of the already mandatory utilities they need to survive since they dont get their burst and defense gifted to them on their weaponsets unlike black powder and backstab.
How about we ban you from playing thief and force you to play ele and mesmers and non-bunker rangers against thieves as your sole pvp experience. Let’s see how that “learn to counter” tune of yours last.
I guess people also learn to counter the absurd warriors signet too, somehow.
What I find more broken in that video is that said thief interrupting you can do so 3-4 times in a row.
Most classes at best get 2 interrupts on 30+ sec cd’s.
Stun=Daze=knockdown=Launch all this effect make interupt
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stun
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Daze
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Knock_down
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/LaunchWarrior,Mesmer,Thief,Elementalist,Engineer etc can you interupted 4+ in a row no only Thief.
1) Learn the mechanics of this game
2)Now you are qualified to write on the forum
Learn to not be stupid for once. All those classes in order to interrupt 3-4 times have to choose weapons that are only good for that, suck offensively, and in general those builds are not viable and have much longer cooldowns than a thief interrupting.
Tell me which viable ele spec can easily interrupt attack from range several times and still burst people down.
What I find more broken in that video is that said thief interrupting you can do so 3-4 times in a row.
Most classes at best get 2 interrupts on 30+ sec cd’s.
Ever met a turret Engie with APT or a blackout mesmer? Thief looks like every other class when compared to those two and the amount of CC they have.
Rarely, because those builds are nowhere near as good as the alternatives. Since when are blackout mesmers even generally useful in spvp or wvw.
Turret engineers only work on a point, whereas the thief can interrupt from range and his utility isn’t stationary. Turret engineers also only exist in spvp. D/P and S/P thieves exist in both wvw and spvp.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
My question is how can developer design rangers to not have burst and yet expect any of their power builds to be viable?
They said they wanted to make ranger more sustained but nerfed endurance regen for ALL ranger specs, including the weak power/offensive ones who depended on that endurance dearly for survival.
1) Condi damage is ranged and goes through protection’s damage reduction.
This is a condition thread, not a necro thread. Your ridiculous claim that condition damage is all ranged is just ludicrous. Pleas at least try to offer at least some level of logic if you wish to make a counter argument. Post like this are the original problem in the first place. Though it is true that all conditions that due damage ignore protection. It is also true that conditions can be negated entirely by cleanses.
Necro condi damage is all ranged. Learn to be aware of context. I quoted a guy talking about condi vs. power necro.
If you’re using warhorn you’re missing either boon strip or condi transfer, in which case your only cleanse is consume conditions and putrid mark.
And no, swarm aint going to stick you to anyone with a teleport who also has access to swiftness, which is most teleport or leap users like warriors, thieves, and mesmers.
Good luck building life force while CC’d to death, though. I love how you assume every necro starts every fight at 50%+ life force all the time.
There’s a reason why power necros are absent in spvp, and why necros as a roaming class in wvw suck.
Necros are a team class, and condi necro has much better aoe on top of team support and can actually scratch bunkers unlike your power necro who won’t kill a guardian or bunker ranger ever.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
What I find more broken in that video is that said thief interrupting you can do so 3-4 times in a row.
Most classes at best get 2 interrupts on 30+ sec cd’s.
What bulletproof defense? My ele has mist form, during which he cannot do anything as opposed to thief and warrior, and if we bring up armor of earth it means necro corrupt boon bait or flanking strike spam got rid of a 75+ sec cd.
There is no comparison whatsoever. Thief shadowstep is a double stun breaker, with condition cleanse, and a double port. That alone makes it one of the most broken defensive cd’s for a mere 50 sec cd. What other utility skill condenses two mobility aspects with a stun break, and condition cleanse all rolled in?
And then we have the issue of elites with lyssa where a thief gets another 45 sec cd full condi cleanse alongside stability.
What’s more, it’s not only in the department of burst and defensives where thieves easily push eles and mesmers out (not to mention poor rangers and zerker rifle engineers and power necros).
It’s the fact that thieves alongside warriors also have far superior sustained damage when you look at the autoattack doing so much damage versus the ele’s and mesmer’s pathetic autoattacks.
Nobody seems to really notice just how strong thief and warrior autoattacks are relative to the other classes, and how that aspect allows them to pressure so effectively after they’ve landed their burst versus a class like the ele or mesmer where if you can heal their burst they’re pretty much screwed until their long cooldowns come back up.
Warrior and thief glass builds farm all the other glass builds, because invulnerabilities and stealth coupled with easy, frequent burst make them kings of that role.
So all the other classes need to go condi bunker to not be free kills to them.
Ok. More complains about thiefs. Thiefs are Damage, and Evade, that’s it. We exist almost solely for PVP. And we don’t handle much more than 2-3 targets too well. We have high single target DPS, and literally nothing else. Why should Ele’s, arguably the best support class in the game, be better than thiefs at the ONLY thing we do?
Yeah, it’s not like cluster bomb thief isn’t the best aoe class after staff ele in the game, and unlike staff ele they can actually fend for themselves.
They kind of are already….
I run longbow and sword/warhorn.
The 2 on longbow will hit units even after they go invisible. same with the warhorn’s 4. If you’re skilled enough at weapon swapping, you can preform both before your opponent disappears. This works well against the low-health thieves, but isn’t as great against condition bunker mesmers.
Except all the thief needs to do while stealthed is to port across you to break your channel or if he’s D/P just daze you at will before stealthing.
There is a cd. Power break has a 2 sec cd after activation.
It’s incredible that a backstab can be blocked or hit someone invulnerable and the thief can continue spamming it.
Backstab burst can be repeated so frequently compared to other classes’ burst sequences, and on top of it all your burst is invisible. If an ele switches to air attunement and I see him closing in I know he’s gonna do a lightning strike into phoenix combo and can react properly. Hell, I can even see his hardest hitting skill on a 35+ sec cd winding up before it lands.
The elementalist’s phoenix + lightning strike and electric discharge deals up to twice as much damage as a heartseeker + backstab. I think this should be noted.
Yeah, no. I have both. Not close to twice the damage.
And that’s assuming you land all three, and that involves 3 different cooldowns, all with a base 15+ sec cd.
And none of those 3 disable your opponent from hitting you, because all thieves like to behave as if every class runs a melee weapon they can spam aoe with, when reality is that most classes don’t have the spammable aoe to really threaten a stealthed thief outside the engineer and necromancer or warrior.
The fact is stealth mechanics are stupid.
It’s both a defensive and offensive tool which allows the thief to completely control the flow of battle. And if he gets in a bad situation, he can reset forever until his opponent is out of cooldowns to counter him.
It’s incredible that a backstab can be blocked or hit someone invulnerable and the thief can continue spamming it.
It’s incredible you have to swing wildly around the air and there’s not even a blurred hint that your ability was wasted or connected, because the only counterplay against a thief by non-thieves is sheer guesswork and luck.
Backstab burst can be repeated so frequently compared to other classes’ burst sequences, and on top of it all your burst is invisible. If an ele switches to air attunement and I see him closing in I know he’s gonna do a lightning strike into phoenix combo and can react properly. Hell, I can even see his hardest hitting skill on a 35+ sec cd winding up before it lands.
But really, it’s the ability for effortless reset that gets me. If I make a mistake on any other class, I’m dying. On the thief, all I need is a bp>HS reset to run away even if I can’t win, and nobody except another thief can chase me down.
No, nerf the condi damage first. It is out of control.
spvp dps test for Necromancer
Condi http://www.twitch.tv/xxkakarot/c/3844048 Total of 7 skills used
Power http://www.twitch.tv/xxkakarot/c/3844034 Total of 4 skills usedthat 11111 spam in the power build needs to be nerfed…
1) Condi damage is ranged and goes through protection’s damage reduction.
2) The power necro has crap for gap closers and can get kited forever.
3) The power necro goes down faster than a prom dress given he’s made of toilet paper levels of toughness.
Although I’m sure you were just being dishonest, as any thief like you would love more power necros to have around so you can farm them.
Warriors need a damage nerf more than the signet nerf, though a 15-20% nerf is necessary anyways if they won’t nerf their “lalala you can’t do anything to me for 6+ seconds while I cleave you to death” stances.
Rangers need serious cleaving/aoe options. It’s one of the main reasons they’re useless in large scale WvW and undesired in PvE.
Just making pets take 80% less damage from aoe and cleaving, giving them their own separate heal on the pet bar, and a baseline speed increase would help a lot.
Remove the 45 sec cd on pet death. Keep the cd at 15 seconds per swap.
Buff pet f2 because their utility is miserable for the cd the f2 has, make it instant or 0.5 sec and usable on the move.
Pet CC skills and stuff like moa cry should not be randomly activated by the AI. It should be under player control.
But we’ve been talking about this for over 1.5+ years so who knows if anything will change considering Jon Peters announced shortly after release that rangers would be revised, and there’s yet to be any meaningful revision. In fact, the biggest changes to rangers for the most part have been nerfs to the condi bunkers for spvp’s sake.
pets need to cleave. Ranged pets with projectile need aoe so they can complement the ranger.
Increase the range of ranged pets to 1200 so they can shoot down from walls plz.
PLEASE, do NOT remove spirits.
They are visually an iconic part of the class.
Rework them so they can’t be targeted and work like flags with no health pool, and this will remove the issue of bodyblocking that people complain about.
Spirits are one of the few things that add visual flair to the ranger as his arrow animations on the longbow are utterly plain, as are his melee weapons.
I will be greatly peeved if spirits are removed when guardians get to keep their blue fire and necromancers their minion zoo, which clutters a lot more.
Rangers in gw2 are druidic and deeply tied to nature magic. If you remove the spirits, you remove that magical aspect.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
Maybe it’s the axe autoattack that needs nerfing more than cyclone needs fixing?
Warriors are flat out kittened. The warrior offhand axe skill 5 still does about double the damage of a ranger’s whirling defense, you can move while doing so, and in fact if anything most warrior weapons except for mace need damage nerfs considering how far above everybody else their damage is.
No class except the thief can do the sustained damage of a warrior, and warriors are the one class that gets away with playing in knights gear.
Warriors have nothing to complain about. Have you SEEN the offhand axe Ranger skill 5? Thought not. Also, damage-buffing Warriors, whether it would make them OP or not (even though every other profession knows warriors are OP anyway) should be the last thing on the devs’ priorities list right now.
Ranger axe 5 is actually one of the best skills ranger has, considering the massive amount of utility on top of the damage it deals.
LOL
“Hey guys, im going to self root, effectively CC’ing myself just to reflect projectiles while doing less damage in this long channel than my own autoattack chain!”
MASSIVE UTILITY INDEED. THAT’S WHY SO MANY POWER RANGERS ARE AROUND.
That’s exactly what we need. Nerfing one thing to make another look appealing. And just like thief almost everything in a warriors kit is built around doing damage, it’s what the class was built for. We don’t have great boons, or aoe, or illusions, or stealth. We hit things and that’s about it.
Thank god you’re not in charge of anything important. Once again, what other classes have or do not have is completely irrelevant to this topic.
Warriors don’t have boons? What a load of crap. With the signet elite you pretty much have perma fury/might stacks and high uptime on swiftness,. Warrior has the most ready access to the offensive boons.
Damage is the most valuable asset a class can bring in a game with no trinity, so DUH the two classes with the best damage skills are going to govern.
Maybe it’s the axe autoattack that needs nerfing more than cyclone needs fixing?
Warriors are flat out kittened. The warrior offhand axe skill 5 still does about double the damage of a ranger’s whirling defense, you can move while doing so, and in fact if anything most warrior weapons except for mace need damage nerfs considering how far above everybody else their damage is.
No class except the thief can do the sustained damage of a warrior, and warriors are the one class that gets away with playing in knights gear.
Warriors have nothing to complain about. Have you SEEN the offhand axe Ranger skill 5? Thought not. Also, damage-buffing Warriors, whether it would make them OP or not (even though every other profession knows warriors are OP anyway) should be the last thing on the devs’ priorities list right now.
Ranger axe 5 is actually one of the best skills ranger has, considering the massive amount of utility on top of the damage it deals.
LOL
“Hey guys, im going to self root, effectively CC’ing myself just to reflect projectiles while doing less damage in this long channel than my own autoattack chain!”
MASSIVE UTILITY INDEED. THAT’S WHY SO MANY POWER RANGERS ARE AROUND.
Why power rangers don’t work:
- In addition to their lower base numbers, power based rangers have no way to deal with boon stacking. This forces the ranger to go into conditions to deal with opponents who have high access to protection and aegis.
-Ranger burst is too slow in delivery and highly telegraphed. Maul is the easiest burst skill to dodge by far, and in order to do any amount of burst the ranger requires signet stacking that has 60+ sec cd’s. Mesmer/thief/warrior burst has much lower cd, in fact most of them can burst high every 15 seconds or less.
- Power ranger defenses are bad. You have signet of stone and that’s it. When you nerfed spirit ranger dodging, you gutted power ranger survivability, what little thay had left.
Glass specs either need high cc and evasion alongside burst (burst which rangers don’t have, as their burst is staggered because of raven f2 activation delay and maul telegraphing), or they need ample access to immunities like warrior stances and mesmer distortion.
The ranger has little of those. 2 dodges and a serpent strike isn’t going to keep a ranger alive.
Ranger weapons:
-Mainhand sword needs to have its leap animation interruptible by dodge. Buff the damage of the abilities by 10%
-Axe offhand needs to have whirling defense be a moving skill. Increase its damage as the channel does terrible damage for the amount of time channeled compared to other skills. The Phantasmal Warden puts the ranger skill to shame.
- Axe mainhand needs ricochet damage tripled. Its damage is horrendously low baseline. Splitblade needs its direct damage portion also increased significantly to be worthwhile to power based specs.
It’s kind of curious how the trait for axes increases crit damage yet the mainhand axe is only useful as a condition weapon because of it’s ghastly power base numbers and coefficients.
- Greatsword needs a damage increase of about 20% to all its skills. Change maul vulnerability to 10 stacks or change it to something else altogether. Its current stack application is weak.
- Leap could use a 1 second root.
- Shortbow was overnerfed. Poison spread is a terrible skill with terrible damage and poison duration. Thief bow completely overshadows the ranger shortbow as the thief shorbow: a) has incredibly powerful aoe, b) has a far superior poison FIELD that can be blasted for weaknes, c) has better defensive tools with a teleport or chain evades and cripple.
- Longbow needs a cripple or a lower cd on knockback shot. Remove the low threshold of damage and make the medium baseline with the large damage threshold being 600 range+
Buff Barrage damage significantly. For a 25 sec cd traited aoe it’s absolutely horrible AoE.
Make both the shortbow and longbow pierce baseline.
For the ranger himself, here are the problems:
- Terrible coefficients on power weapons. You nerf power weapons to account for pet damage, yet conditions for rangers do 100% of their damage without penalty. Right there, you have forced rangers to spec into condition specs for most of their builds, because the base numbers for power weapons are so low.
- Lack of access to boons. Ranger only has access to regen and swiftness, the weakest boons. If the class is designed around not having boons, then its damage and defenses should be balanced with that lack of access in mind. Currently it is not. Warriors and thieves and conjure elementalists are self sufficient because they can stack offensive boons pretty efficiently, inflating their damage numbers significantly.
- Lack of boons means lack of group utilities. Spirits do not come even close to the utility of warrior banners or elementalist fields might/fury stacking. On top of that spirits die pretty quickly to aoe in wvw and boss mechanics. The spirits also need a minimum of 20 points in nature magic to not be total garbage.
- Ranger utilities are really bad and require heavy trait support to be less bad. The signets all require 30 points in Marksman for signet of the beastmaster, as they’re useless without the trait. The actives need to be affecting the ranger BASELINE. The 30 point trait could simply grant the ranger the passives while the signets are on cooldown.
-Traps need to be 900 and greater range baseline. They also need to do more considering necromancer marks and engineer grenades and elementalist staff skills do much more without taking up utility slots. Condense the traps or add additional effects.
- Shouts are worthless. Protect Me causes the pet to not attack, costing damage and hurting your pet! Guard is the worst offender, doing literally nothing but being the source of protection for the pet. None of the shouts have meaningful group utility, and a 30 point nature magic trait giving swiftness and regen is severely underbudget considering guardian and warrior shouts.
- Stunbreakers have too long cd’s. Ranger stunbreakers are really bad, and it’s part of the reason why many rangers feel the need to spec full bunker since their offensive specs do not have the defensive options to survive.
-Condition removal on the ranger is tied to healing spring. The others are a passive, random removals that either cost 30 trait points on the defense line, or a utility slot that also happens to damage the pet.
You need to stop doing these utilities that shift negative outcomes from the ranger onto the pet. The other classes don’t suffer setbacks for using their condition and stun clears, why should the ranger’s pet suffer for the ranger taking advantage of a trait or utility skill?
- Entangle and Rampage as One are weak elites because Entangle is made obsolete by teleports clearing roots (and players being able to move out of roots in between pulses without havint to break the roots), and Rampage as One is easily boonstripped.
- Heal as One will never be taken as it’s a much weaker heal than troll unguent and doesn’t clear conditions like healing srping. Moreover, troll unguent and heal as one will never be used by offensive specs as offensive specs have little access to condition removal outside healing spring.
Redesign the Water spirit. It is worthless in light of healing spring’s superior effects as a water blast field with condition removal, and on demand healing nature compared to the water spirit’s random heal proc.
- Change Storm spirit proc to weakness or blind. Swiftness is worthless in most of the game settings when it is easily provided by most other classes at a cheaper to no opportunity cost.
I play 60/40 Dungeons and Fractals vs. WvW roaming/small scale.
The ranger problems are as follows:
-Pet doesn’t scale with gear. Set stats are horrible as berk players can get up to 60-70% crit damage bonus or more while the pet maxes at 30% crit damage bonus and requires a trait. Pets also can’t have their precision increased.
With the release of ascended gear, pets, which comprise 30-40% of a ranger’s damage, fall behind.
Scale pets with the ranger’s stats like mesmer illusions. In fact, do this for all minions. Scaling is a very important part for viability of minions.
- Pets have terrible AI. Pets stop all the time to have animations for attacks. These animations should work on the move, because otherwise pets can never have uptime on a moving target. Every time my wolf goes to autoattack an engineer with swiftness, he lands maybe one autoattack and then spends much more time catching up to the target since he self-rooted to bite the engineer.
Pets also have erratic delivery of F2 skills, and F2 skills should have 0.5 sec cast times at most considering their weaker effects for the most part.
-So many of the pet families are bad. Bears autoattack for less than a burning damage tick from a noncondition spec. So do moas. Moas with a measly 3-6 vuln stacks on a hefty cooldown is really bad. The moa vulnerability stacks need to be raised or replaced with weakness instead.
Moa, bear, and anything that isn’t a drake/feline/wolf needs their damage from autoattacks raised to compete. Pig’s Forage F2 skill should automatically give the foraged weapon to the ranger or work like steal where the f2 button turns into the foraged ability.
-All pets need cleaving. Ranger AoE is terrible precisely because all pets but the drake don’t have any AoE whatsoever, and melee pets don’t cleave. So a melee spec ranger with a melee pet has 30-40% of his damage not cleaving, unlike the other melee classes like guardians and warriors and sword thieves.
- Raise pet speed to 33% native increase.
- Have the pet have his own separate heal on its pet bar as the F5. Linking pet recovery to the ranger is horrible design, as it forces the ranger to waste a heal he may not need just to keep the pet up.
- Remove the pet death penalty, just leave a 15 sec swap cd. The 45 sec cd on pet death when you make the death of a pet so easy and frequent is not enjoyable play.
- Implement the 70-80% damage avoidance to AoE already. Pets will never be viable in WvW and PvE so long as you insist on making pets who cannot dodge tank damage that was designed to be lethal to players. You could raise pet health by 500% and it still would mean just a couple of seconds more before a pet dies in a zerg or to high level fractal mobs.
-The trait for 2 sec quickness on pet swap is worthless considering the pet staggers for the same amount of time after it has switched in.
- Make boons on the ranger apply to the pet natively. Pets are a portion of the ranger’s damage, an extension of their functionality. What you currently have imposed on rangers is like making a warrior go 20 points into his defense line so boons apply to his greatsword skills.
YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE TO TRAIT PETS FOR THEM TO BE FUNCTIONAL. THEY SHOULD BE GOOD BASELINE.
(edited by Zenith.7301)
Pretty standard.
Warrior, Thief, and at some point mesmer all shut down all the other power builds because warriors, thieves, and mesmers have the most frequent spike opportunities paired with the most immunity/control skills.
If you can spike and defend against the opponent’s spike better than they can against yours, you take them out of the equation.
People whine about condi meta, but most classes go condi because if they went power they’d be eaten alive by thieves and warriors and mesmers.
Take the scepter ele for example. In order to make it work, you need to use arcane utilities, and spec for some crit chance while having 13-14k HP.
The scepter ele can do high burst combos, but only every 20+ seconds, and fire grab is on a 36+ sec cd, as are most of his CC skills.
Ele defensive skills are on 60+ sec cd’s. With 14k HP, it means a mesmer or warrior or thief with a backstab or eviscerate/whirlwind or shatter will take out half your health with a single skill.
Warrior/thief/mesmer burst is more spammable than ele burst, and on top of that scepter ele sustained damage is really bad. It’s why scepter eles can’t take on condi bunkers but thieves and warriors can, because thieves and warriors not only have spike, but much better autoattack damage to keep sustained pressure.
Mesmer only achieves good sustain with phantasms up, and phantasm specs are garbage in team fights due to how easy phantasms die to splash damage.
Ranger and necro power specs are utter garbage. Both have terrible survival, poor access to condi cleansing and ill designed weapon and trait support. The ranger and necro power specs also put out pitifully low burst and are susceptible to being CC’d to death.
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I count December, January, and February in the amount of time you’ve had to come with substantive changes for ailing classes like the Ranger in PvE.
And all I can see is an anemic list of changes. What gives?
The change to Burning Speed makes no sense. Burning speed is the damage staple of an elementalist. As an elementalist, because your autoattacks do terrible damage, you need to spam a chain of cooldown skills. And a large portion of that damage as DD is a burning speed.
Which means timing burning speed, a gap closer and burst opener as a defensive skill makes no sense. It’s just like making Swoop evade.
This seems like a poorly made bandaid to a bigger problem; monster AI. You see, the reason Zerker is so powerful right now is that the AI is dumb enough to stand in front of you while you unleash your hard hitting moves. They don’t block your spike damage, they don’t move out of AoEs, they don’t scatter from your hundred blades, and they hardly ever buff themselves. The AI just sits there and tries to tank the damage until they die. This makes control pretty much useless as you don’t need anything to hold the mobs in place while you smack at them. Now this is fine in most places in the over world, but unacceptable in dungeons where you should be fighting the elite enemies.
In short, buff the AI of enemies in dungeons and future content, and you’ll see more build diversity. Sure, most players will still utilize full zerk when they learn it, but they won’t all utilize exactly the same build.
CC would change nothing. Warrior and guardian already dominate those and you can CC in berserker gear so it wouldn’t introduce diversity.
And just like how those mobs could dodge all the big hits or skills would affect the already inferior non-berserker specs.
Blanket changes won’t work. You can’t nerf everyone and call it balanced. You need to nerf/buff the outliers.
What a stupid change. So necros have to blow their only line of defense just to take advantage of the trait?
Lifeblast and Life Drain should be good baseline for condi necros without requiring a trait, period. Its damage should scale with condi damage and power stats.
Change Dhuumfire to instead transfer a condition to surrounding foes from the necromancer and grant the necromancer 7 stacks of might for 10 seconds whenever burning, bleeding, or poison is applied to them. 20-25 sec ICD.
The problem with necromancer is that none of them can run without a staff, because staff, offhand dagger, and consume conditions is their only form of condi removal on a power build. What is a condi trait doing on a power line, I don’t even get.
Power necros need serious help.
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Even at 60% capped crit damage, which is what it always should have been, Zerker will still be better than condition damage.
Please, there’s a reason everybody runs zerker, and it’s not for the “slight” difference between it and the alternatives.
Next on the chopping block should be warrior PvE and guardian sustain, especially guardian reflection uptimes. Blind should have diminishing returns, or guardians should have less access to it.
Warrior banners/FGJ duration also need a nerf comparing their utility to other classes’ utility.
Buff necromancer dagger and axe, and make necro dagger hit 3 targets, or make weapons restricted to single targets do more damage than weapons that cleave (warrior axe vs. thief and necro dagger).
Buff the terrible elementalist scepter and dagger autoattacks, especially water attunement autoattacks. Your only source of competitive damage shouldn’t be lightning hammer or fire attunement staff.
Buff ranger greatsword, buff ranger pet trait with 30% crit dmg bonus to 60% so rangers can gain same crit dmg bonus to all their damage contributions as all the other classes instead of having 30-50% of their damage only have 30% crit dmg bonus.
Give pets/minions 70-80% aoe damage reduction so they’re actually useful in dungeons and WvW in particular. Make ranger melee pets cleave with their autoattacks, and remove the huge 45 sec cd death cooldown and replace it with a 15-20 sec cd death cd.
Give weapons like guardian mace/warrior mace and shield more use.
Outright buff ranger mainhand/offhand axes. Make whirling defense usable while moving.
P.S. I’m just happy cheesy D/P thieves with 110% crit dmg bonus are history. No more 8-9k backstabs with permastealth might stacking cheesiness.
I’d just like for any other gear to be closer in performance to berzerker.
I can run berzerker gear everywhere to good effect, WvW included.
In fact, some classes like thief and mesmer and warrior lend themselves rather well to berzerker gear because they have defensives that allow them to stay offensive.
I just don’t get how a necromancer or thief autoattack dagger chain, limited to one target without cleave, can be doing less damage than a warrior and guardian’s cleaving weapons.
I don’t get who thought allowing D/P thieves and phantasm mesmers roam in WvW in zerker with 110%+ bonus crit damage was a good idea.
Berzerker just scales in a way that rampager does not.
Berzerker just needs to be capped at 60% bonus crit damage just like spvp.
The damage scaling is out of whack compared to all the other gear, and quite honestly this game’s PvE is pretty horrible when bosses last less than 2 minutes against a full berzerker group.
The worst part is they will likely blanket nerf berzerker without realizing the huge practical DPS disparities between classes. It’s been forever ever since guardians and warriors have ruled the PvE game, and the only viable DPS ele weapon are conjures instead of their kitten ed mainhands because many classes’ autoattacks are so bad compared to warrior/guard/LH ele.
sry but you are talking trash here.
try a staff ele and realize how wrong you are, please.
+ every profession has its use in PvE. only necro is lacking compared to other professions.
the reason why you see so many warriors is because warrior has the most room for error by far. D/D autoattacks are horrendous, and for staff ele you just sit in fire spamming fireball because all the other attunement autoattacks suck.
The most practical DPS is usually the most consistent, best DPS. I’d rather bring a berk warrior ascalonian fractal than a berk ele who will die in 1 hit when it would take 2-3 to take the warrior out, and the berk ele has no damage advantage despite the survivability handicap.
And no, staff ele isn’t even close to LH ele mainhand damage. Staff ele isn’t a melee playstyle either.
Berzerker just needs to be capped at 60% bonus crit damage just like spvp.
The damage scaling is out of whack compared to all the other gear, and quite honestly this game’s PvE is pretty horrible when bosses last less than 2 minutes against a full berzerker group.
The worst part is they will likely blanket nerf berzerker without realizing the huge practical DPS disparities between classes. It’s been forever ever since guardians and warriors have ruled the PvE game, and the only viable DPS ele weapon are conjures instead of their kitten ed mainhands because many classes’ autoattacks are so bad compared to warrior/guard/LH ele.
Great, buff 100b by 20% so when you land a stun on them you’re guaranteed to 100-0 mostly anything that isn’t spamming protectiona and aegis and stacking 1800+ toughness.
Warrior healing isn’t even the problem. They need their damage nerfed. They outdamage every class by far because their base skills do a metric ton more damage, it’s just the numbers. A warrior in knights does more sustained damage than a d/d berk ele.
Bears and moas will never be used for the simple reason that they do no damage whatsoever.
Bear autoattacks hit for less than a burning tick on a power spec. Moa is not too far behind on how terrible its damage is.
No amount of utility will ever overcome the premium that is damage. Damage is the best commodity in a game with no healers.
The same can be said for greatsword and Barrage. The problem with barrage is not only its cooldown, it’s that you do more damage to yourself on someone with retal than you actually do to the targets. The skill tickles compared to other classes’ aoe.
And longbow will not work like mesmer greatsword because mesmer can pair greatsword with staff to keep ranged options while having defense. The ranger has no effective defensive ranged weapons. You can disengage with monarch’s leap but doing so means your ranged pressure drops to zero as you do no damage with a melee weapon from range unlike mesmer staff.
Mesmer greatsword also has amazing burst from illusionary berserker that is aoe cleave to boot, applies a cripple, and does the damage of a rapid fire in the small time it takes to cast it compared to rapid fire’s long cast time (and horrible DPS by definition as the autoattack from midrange or more actually outdamages the rapid fire channel).
Adding the cast time to the longbow stealth and knockback just makes the weapon even more vulnerable, as those are your only defenses and you NEED them to even last a bit longer.
And most importantly, ranger utilities suck and require trait investment to even work (signets require 30 markman, are totally worthless outside signet of renewal without any trait points; spirits require 20-30 in Nature Magic or else they too are worthless).
Rangers also have little active condition removal and all of their stunbreaks are terrible. Signet of Renewal is a whopping 60 sec cd, just for a stunbreak and condi removal. Lightning Reflexes has no condition removal, and your only sources of condi removal are healing spring, signet of renewal and a 30 point trait in Wilderness.
Power builds will never be viable because pets dont get crit damage from the ranger’s, so they’re effectively capped at 30% crit bonus while power classes can hit 60% crit dmg bonus in spvp and 110%+ in WvW/PvE, and god forbid they introduce ascended stats in spvp because they introduced stat upgrades in pve but forgot to update pets to those upgrade values, making pve rangers even worse off as 30-40% of their damage doesn’t scale at all.
Pets can’t hit moving targets, and they already said they’re not going to open the “can of worms” that is the AI they forced on this class (introduced a flawed mechanic, and then throw up your arms and decide not to fix the class you broke from the start because it’s time consuming and AI is unpopular in spvp, that’s developers for you).
Pets have no aoe/cleave outside the drake, so melee rangers are even more handicapped because unlike other melee who cleave with all their abilities, melee rangers have less cleave damage, and due to the erratic delivery of pet damage power/burst rangers are not viable as they are too fragile and have none of the burst to compensate for it.
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That death blossom change is meaningless. The skill needs retooling because it’s on a weaponset with no condition support, and as we can see with rangers and eles hybrid weapons don’t work compared to specialized ones (why power based warrior and mesmer skills are better, and why necro and engineer condi weapons are better).
Remove the bleeds from leaping death blossom, and make it either apply 7 vulnerability stacks or so or place weakness on it if you want to make it a defensive skill.
Quite frankly it should be the cleave damage alternative to the dagger, so its damage should be buffed by a good amount and its power scaling as well.
Pistol Whip should apply some stacks of cripple per strike the target suffers. Or vulnerability.
If the rest of the changes happen, especially the elites, they must be spvp exclusive. Thieves are outright broken in WvW and these spike buffs and mobility buffs will break them even more in a format where you don’t have the holding of points to keep them in check.
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rank 29 … i love how the veteran pvpers are being rewarded
You’ve got a finisher he will not have for many months.
You’ll get into good teams, instead of crappy ones, by account of your experience. He’ll have to wing it with other lesser experienced people.
I don’t get people who complain about not being rewarded for playing a lot. The playing itself should be a reward. You know how to play better than him, what more do you want?
If he wants to get better, he’ll have to play as much as you. If you want an icy dragon sword, all it takes you is a week of farming PvE, and you’ll have enough gold to make it.
If you ask me, he’s got the crappier deal.
The people who hate AI builds are probably the players who play gimmick glass cannon gib builds.
Thieves, warriors, you know, the only classes with viable glass cannon builds.
If you go shatter mesmer expect to get farmed by thieves, especially s/d, and warriors. Engineers will walk all over a shatter mesmer, and a minion necro will as well.
the words of a PU/phantasm mesmer ^
Very good shatter mesmers can do very well, and operate in team settings much better than the last two, the only reason to run PU/phantasm mesmer is because your ego is attached to victory in a 1v1.
Yeah, keep piling that crap on your steaming pile.
Shatter mesmer gets farmed by s/d thief and warrior any day, any time.
so, the races imbalance the game and your solution is more imbalance and race advantages?
From my point of view, it actually makes sense. Just don’t tell me that the longer sword in RL will have the same range as shorter sword.
In RL if a ball of fire impacts you or you get shocked by lightning, you don’t keep going your merry way about it either.
But somehow my warrior can eat about 7-8 fireballs until he dies.
The people who hate AI builds are probably the players who play gimmick glass cannon gib builds.
Thieves, warriors, you know, the only classes with viable glass cannon builds.
If you go shatter mesmer expect to get farmed by thieves, especially s/d, and warriors. Engineers will walk all over a shatter mesmer, and a minion necro will as well.
Depends on what you want to do.
Team play, phantasm.
Phantasm can play offensive. PU is an entirely attrition based, low mobility spec.
You cannot chase as PU, and you cannot kill anyone if they want to disengage.
PU is a punishment spec. It’s really good for staying alive against multiple opponents, counters berserk gib specs like thieves and warriors, and it’s your “stay alive” spec that will be as close as it gets for mesmer bunkering.
Phantasm mesmers are the offensive equivalent. They’re not easy to trivialize like shatter mesmers, but have less aoe damage since their shatters suck and phantasms outside berserker are single target.
Phantasm mesmers are very good still for 1v1, but they are more punishing to play in terms of messing up, because they don’t have the bulk or peels of a phantasm mesmer (you lack the stealth and prot/aegis spam of PU).
Basically, both are good 1v1 specs with crappy team play ability (PU is much worse, but both still suck in team fights where aoe kills your clones easily). PU is the defensive 1v1 build, and phantasm the offensive 1v1 build.
If my ele could sustain the damage of a warrior, have 2 immunity skills, low cd stability and condi clears with 17-18k hp and critting people for 4k event at like 1800 toughness, and have guardian regen, I’d play him too.
They nerfed everything from ele’s. They nerfed their disengage while warrior’s rush and whirlwind attack and sword leap remained the same, less than 20 sec cd.
Thief can use iniltrator’s arrow even more.
They nerfed ele condi removal but gave warrior 8-10 secs of condi immunity and cleansing ire.
They nerfed the ele’s aura because his chill soft CC and high fury uptimes were somehow wrong, but warrior can chain stun you and now thief with extra ini regen can daze spam your heals more, and both the warrior and thief virtually have much higher fury uptimes, not to mention their base damage on skills were always higher than ele.
40 sec cd on RTL is a joke, as is mist form inability to heal when the warrior with a stance that lasts tripple what mist form lasts can continue attacking and using his heals.
F2 skills are terrible in general. A moa with a 4 sec prot on a huge cooldown and a cast time, and that’s the case for most pet F2 — marginal skills with large cooldowns.
Run PU mesmer, laugh at thieves and anything that isn’t a necro or engineer.
Thieves hardcounter all glass builds for obvious reasons. The reason is they can reset fights at will and burst for well over 70-80% of most glass cannons’ health pool, and since they run on initiative their offensive momentum refreshes faster than defensive cooldowns of their opponents do.
This effect is only amplified in WvW where you can have 25 stacks of bloodlust and well over 70%+ crit damage.
In fact, OP got lucky the thief that killed him was D/D, which is a much weaker variant compared to D/P.
Against a D/D thief you can run him out of initiative trying to stealth, and if you distortion a backstab signet spike you can handle them well.
A D/P thief on the other hand can proceed to stealth every 4-5 seconds for a new backstab attempt and there’s nothing you can do about it if they know how to pull off BP>heartseeker combos.
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“The thief has a better short-bow and the warr has a better longbow.” it’s funny cause it’s true.
The Warrior Longbow? Absolutely. The Thief Shortbow? I laugh in your general direction. Barely any damage to the thief shortbow. #1 ricochets, #2 just explodes or can go into multiple explosions, #3 is the same as Ranger SB #3, #4 is just a poison field, and #5 just lets you teleport a distance. It’s crap compared to the Ranger SB in terms of damage.
As an aoe weapon the thief shortbow is supremely better, and in terms of burst a berk thief landing clusterbombs is a lot more deadly since he can actually run berserker specs to good effect whereas berserker shortbow rangers are free kills.
- isn’t the same as ours, considering they can chain it, and #4 is a poison field far better than poison spread, with longer duration and combo opportunities such as aoe weakness.
Their #5 is basically a guaranteed escape or chasing tool.
So all SB ranger has over thief SB is slightly higher single target, which is useless in team fights since the longbow is a better single target tool anyways.
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Water spirit will never be used by a ranger for the sole reason that Healing Spring is the only on demand condi clear tool besides signet of renewal for the ranger, and on spirit builds rangers don’t even have signet of renewal so healing spring is their only way to survive against necromancers and engineers and even warriors.
You also forgot to mention in your generous comparison that the turret is a standalone heal, whereas the Water Spirit requires a 20-30 point investment in nature magic, not only being inferior but having a larger opportunity cost.
And that’s the whole summary of rangers. Only one viable build in spirits or BM condi bunkers, and ALL of their builds require heavy trait investments to prop their garbage baseline utilities just to make them usable.
But don’t worry, Powerr called rangers “competitive in PvE with strong burst” so rest assured we have developers that are in tune with the actual state of the class and not ones who do live chats with cleric thieves on double pistols.
It’ll just take another year or two to see the kitten pets fixed (pets that can hit a moving target, that are not aoe fodder, that don’t take centuries to activate a fixed conal ability long after the opponent has moved out of it, and actually be in control of utility skills like knockdowns and aoe heal screeches; maybe we will even get to use moas and pigs and any pet that isn’t a wolf or drake for a change) and trait lines cleaned up, too bad that by the time they get the ranger to the standards of today the other actually functional classes will have been iterated farther ahead.
(edited by Zenith.7301)