Guild Wars 2

ManCaptain.3154:

S/D thief > everything else

Not really. D/P is better. There are better bunker busters than S/D, while there are no better gib builds than D/P.

And when your guild only does missions once a week, and you miss those 2 hours, you’re screwed because it’s not like you can find those replacements in the gw2lfg website like you can for fractals.

I wish pets were more about utility than the ranger’s damage.

With D/P the opponent can’t dodge to negate you stealthing, you’ve got a handy ranged interrupt when you’re being kited or someone tries to open space to heal, the same skill you use to retreat into stealth also becomes an anti-melee zone for safety when you enter stealth (while also blinding your opponent), and you can renew that stealth if you don’t want to open yet at a much cheaper cost than following another CnD.

You can also enter stealth without any ranger requirements that might force you to burn a shadowstep. In every way D/P is much more faceroll. It’s not that D/D is bad — it’s that it’s so difficult to screw up D/P’s combo.

That’s why you precast the dragon’s tooth before doing the updraft. But it’s still heavily telegraphed.

Just like fire grab or phoenix. All these skills have obvious animations if you’ve played the ele for any amount of time. You know when an ele draws his arms back he’s gonna do a push animation with fire grab, so you wait till he drags his arms back so when you dodge the dodge frames are still active even when he lightning flashes.

You can do the same with lightning flash and churning earth. Many noobs will dodge immediately, but it’s such a simple combo to dodge if you’re familiar with the channeling time, you can time your dodge frames till the last moment and even with lightning flakitten will not land. This also applies with lightning flash burning speed. It’s a problem that people dodge early, and yes you can punish them.

You can also take measures like taking 30 arcana for the 30 trait that will give you a short root on earth attunement when you use an arcane skill, so you can cast DT, and a second after if the opponent has delayed dodging you can nail him with a root and he has to eat it.

But if anyone has an ele alt they know why in hell would a scepter ele ever stay in melee with you. He’s either going for an updraft, or a fire grab, or a phoenix, or an earthquake, and all of these options are easily flagged by attunement change graphics.

This build is effective on people that are ignorant about ele animations. You could say the same of fighting an asura phantasm mesmer. At first it will be rather rough, but once you get familiar with the conditions, patterns, and animations of attacks gimmick builds lose a lot of steam.

So this build, against competent opponents, becomes more like the role of a roaming thief. You are an opportunistic killer. You stay back in a group fight baiting dodges with dragon tooths and thorwing a couple of ranged spells while saving phoenix and the air skills/hurl/arcane skills, and when you see your teammates have immobilized someone or they are out of dodges and at 60-70%, you do your gib combo for the team.

I still don’t consider this to be close to a roaming build. BM bunker rangers will heal up this burst easily, and you can’t repeat it so often as to overwhelm a build with such big burst and sustained healing. It certainly won’t work on engineers because they can also stall out burst and kill attempts rather well. Any class with a decent amount of protection or stability will nullify this build.

This is a very effective build to have in a spvp team when you’re running multiple eles. 2-3 eles, one of the CC’s will land and unless there’s a guardian around you’ll have the opportunity to dump your burst alongside someone else’s. But this is not aunique ele function — thieves and mesmers (good mesmers) also do this very well.

I just don’t like the idea of some guy going and spending some money on a new set being back in the forums disappointed about the results of his roaming when he came across a good roaming bunker.

The scepter burst spec has existed since closed beta, and there’s a reason why the meta shifted and it became a very niche spec. It requires a lot of support to work around competent and properly specced opponents.

Don’t take minions to dungeons. It’s a waste of utility/elite slot as they’ll be dead in a couple of seconds.

Hahahahahaha, there was never a problem with thieves stealthing, except offensively shutting down most classes that can’t spike aoe/cleave blindly while the thief takes 1/4-1/3 of their health with a backstab that he can keep pulling off as he has to spend no initiative on anything besides CnD and maybe a heartseeker when the target is low.

I wish other classes had the tools to repeatedly shut down someone’s offense and reset the fight whenever they mess up.

If thieves were actually weak to conditions or actually spiky aoe existed for most classes as they broadcast being a weakness of the class, stealth wouldn’t be so bad.

But with all the beta complaints about condition removal, they went with the nuclear option and gave thieves some of the best condition removal in the game, and outside a warrior or mesmer or engineer no other class actually has enough aoe to threaten a thief approaching them while in stealth.

This whole “just use aoe skills” is a joke. Most aoe skills in the game outside shatter and some long cd ele skills or grenades are actually not strong enough to overwhelm a thief’s shadow arts reset and backstab spam.

If they actually nerfed that shadow arts trait to only remove conditions EVERY 3 seconds after you entered stealth instead of everytime you trigger stealth, then it wouldn’t be so bad.

And cloak and dagger should never have been able to trigger from pets or minions. A ranger or necro or mesmer can’t tell their ai to dodge the cnd. It’s ridiculous.

A new condition won’t dent cantrip eles with cleansing water. It just won’t. It won’t dent a ranger with signet of renewal, empathic bond, and healing spring. It won’t dent a guardian with purity, signer, and shout condi removal+purging flames or contemplation of purity.

LightningBlaze.4913:

ahh the assumption that the air rotation is the only burst we ele have… poor easy victims.

Yeah, obviously outside air+arcane utility a Phoenix Burst is SO easy to land rolls eyes.

Too bad you roll over noobs who eat a fire grab or 3 strike phoenix.

P.S. Arc Lightning with berk gear and a few might stacks can do over 6k in squishy targets, but it’s a terrible DPS ability if you actually compare it to other autos. People need to look more than just the numbers. 100b seems great but the reason it’s outdamaged by warrior axe mainhand is because you have to consider the channel time in which that damage number total happens and what could have been done otherwise.

haviz.1340:

Zenith.7301:

It won’t be 3 DPS guardians. More likely ele than guardians, but the likelihood is you’ll find a couple of thor eles coming in.

And you’ll still have thieves if only because they are godly for fractals with shadow refuge, projectile destruction, and Dagger Storm for grawl shaman.

Ele dps is much lower than guardian except that gimmicky lightning hammer but it doesn’t have any utility.

Lightning hammer spec does far more damage, and you don’t need more utility in a team than a mesmer and MAYBE a single guardian.

Utility stacking is overrated in most instances. We do high level fractals routinely with 1 guardian or less. A guardian and a mesmer is more than enough utility.

The ideal party comp if warriors and thieves were nerfed in damage would be:

-Guardian for reflection/pull/defensive boons and good damage.
-Hammer ele for raw DPS, little utility.
-Thief for spike, shadow refuge (godly in so many ways) and projectile deflection from utility and elite.
-Warrior for banner and offensive utility while being a good offensive soaker.
-Mesmer for Time Warp and Reflection/pull/portal tricks.

At the current damage differences there is just no reason for a team to take more than one guardian and mesmer, and then stack warriors with a thief if banners are covered.

Ele hammer is highest sustained at the moment but it brings no utility, is more fragile than warrior, and because his lead over the warrior is marginal, the warriors’ immense offensive utility contribution for group DPS means there’s even no point in taking a hammer ele.

And the other classes just can’t compete.

I also doubt DPS buffs for the ailing classes given the tantrum that will happen with spvp players if mesmers or eles or rangers or engineers or necros get DPS buffs.

You are telling me that people can’t notice when you’re switching to air attunement? 1 second window is still more than enough time to react with an immunity or prot buff.

Most people in WvW run at least 1.6k toughness anyways if they are going to roam.

My BM bunker ranger runs 2.2k toughness. You won’t be hitting me for even close of 12k damage total.

I will eat your little burst on my bunker, heal it back up, and proceed to spank you if you don’t run away.

The difference between this “ranged” burst and a thief is that the thief can drop target and do so for quite a long time. He’s got at least 2 teleports, a stealth from BP>HS at least every 6-7 seconds, and shadow refuge, on top of his stealth heal.

You’ve got long cd cantrips to try to get away, and any engineer or bunker ranger will rock your world.

This build works in spvp with Phantaram because what he does is intervene while a fight is going on and, like a thief, gibs some distracted player who’s out of dodges.

In any WvW teamfight people will notice you are squishy and send a mesmer your way.

This whole “that burst is ranged while his is melee” distinction is a meaningless distinction when you can backstab out of steal or a shadowstep to target, let alone the fact that melee won’t be a problem as you are stealthed and very few classes have spiky nontarget requiring cleave damage to spam while you’re in stealth closing distance.

The thief’s sustained from dagger mainhand auto is also way better post-burst pressure than the ele will be doing once he’s blow his burst. As scepter all your autoattacks blow (6k damage on a 2+ sec channel is pretty measly considering my guardian’s greatsword with pvt gear and berk accessories, not even glass cannon, crits his instant melee auto for 3k cleave).

Range is not really the advantage people make it to be in skirmishes, especially if you’re a class like the thief or mesmer with so many active defenses/target drops to mitigate berserker armor frailty.

Who do you use for peeler? Ele? What’s your role here?

Seeing as more than the traits, it’s the ranger’s weapons and their numbers that suck, I have moderate reservations.

A couple of merged traits won’t fix anything for the class.

Shadow Arts has a broken trait that instead of removing a condition every 3 seconds you are in stealth, it also removes a condition upon entering stealth.

With the amount of times a thief can spam stealth, plus shadow step condi removal, plus shadow refuge, the shadow arts thief is pretty much immune to any condition spec that isn’t an engineer.

As a necro just accept that any thief specced into Shadow Arts will farm you like they farm every other non-bunker build in 1v1 that isn’t a mesmer or other thief. Run accompanied by someone else, either another thief/mesmer or a good bunker guardian/ele who can keep you alive.

Shadow art thieves just can reset a fight at will and still get to maintain surprising damage for their high 1v1 sustain.

Jony.6815:

S/S? backstab on s/d? errrr go back hotjoin plz

The “S” key is next to the “D” key. You do the math, genius.

Especially in the case of ranger weapons, several which have mixed attacks (like mainhand sword, axe, greatsword).

Conditions are too weak without power, and power based attacks are too weak if you have condition damage instead of it.

The pendulum shouldn’t swing so wildly with gear — conditions should be good baseline and so should power, and gear should enhance it modestly.

As long as condi clears remain the way they are, this won’t fix anything. How are you even going to apply conditions when you’re bouncing like a pinball without stability.

Yeah, because apparently 4 seconds is too long a wait in between abusing BP>HS.

At least D/D actually needs to land their CnD to earn a chance at a backstab.

LightningBlaze.4913:

Of course all those ppl that don’t know the potential of a burst build and how to survive with it will only speak nonsense.

Yeah, that’s why you remained vague about said build.

It’s basically a wannabe thief build.

That burst rotation has very high cd, and is pretty telegraphed. Unlike the thief, that ele has no staying power — his escape is crappy and people can focus him down regardless of what he wants to do.

People ran this build in the betas. It’s what got the ele nerfed so much prior to release. Then people realized that a thief can pretty much 3-shot you and so can a mesmer, so they sent the mesmer to dispose of this kind of ele.

The difference between settler and ascended apothecary is marginal benefit to toughness with a substantial hit to healing power.

It’s a very cheap alternative if you don’t wanna farm ascended accessories, though.

If only all the other exotic accessories were as dirt cheap.

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

Zenith.7301:

Nikaido.3457:

Zenith.7301:

Hello banners/fury uptime/best vulnerability stacking besides engineer in the game?

Warrior is far from being the only class that has good vulnerability stacking. DPS guardians have pretty decent vuln stacking.
Fury uptime is a great thing to have, but again, if you were to lower the war’s dps to everyone else’s dps, I’m not sure perma fury would be seen as such a great thing overall. If you slow down the killing speed you might benefit more from other abilities and war have nothing but dps like I said. The magic works so well because of the level of damage, if not for it, warriors would be a pretty sad sight.
As for banners, you wouldn’t need more than one war to bring the only two useful banners, Discipline and Strength.

If you nerf the thief’s and warrior damage, all you’ll be doing is create two miserable classes that will be as undesirable as the ranger, and it’ll just be a new era of guardian, elementalist and mesmers.

Warriors do it easier and with less sacrifice.

More importantly, it’s kind of funny how you consider taking only 1 warrior or thief as a damage to the class, when you see no groups with more than 1 mesmer, let alone any other class except a guardian in fractals.

If the change causes you to take 1 per class and consider bringing other class distributions, then it’s good enough for me. Because when group comp is just a token mesmer while stacking 3-4 warriors or 2 warriors 2 thieves and a mesmer, that’s garbage design.

What will happen after a warrior and thief dps nerf:

1x warrior for banners/fury
1x mesmer
3x dps guardians (mix of greatsword and 1h sword/focus)

You know what’s still not going to be the meta? Rangers. OH SNAP.

It won’t be 3 DPS guardians. More likely ele than guardians, but the likelihood is you’ll find a couple of thor eles coming in.

And you’ll still have thieves if only because they are godly for fractals with shadow refuge, projectile destruction, and Dagger Storm for grawl shaman.

Priest.8752:

stale.9785:

I know they’re bad damage – just get a laugh that on a class where the bow is pretty much the iconic weapon, people don’t want to use it.

This is a problem with the bow skills (Long Range Shot should be static damage and far faster) and the fact that our coefficients are seriously low because a) Anet wants a melee only game, b) our pets are supposed to be 40%+ of our damage, and we’re balanced around 100% pet uptime and hitrate.

You’re missing the point. People would gladly use the bows if they weren’t so terribad.

Partly because bows do less damage, partly because even the shortbow places silly conditions to be optimally played in a setting where those conditions will be minimized, partly because bows don’t cleave outside Barrage, and most importantly because bows don’t have much in defensive measures.

Compare a thief’s shortbow that can chain 3-4 dodge evades with a built in cripple to any of the ranger’s bows defensive measures. The only measure you’ve got on the ranger shortbow is a single evade on a 9 sec cd. Concussive shot at a 25 sec cd.

And with the upcoming weakness changes the thief’s shortbow will be even better because you can combo clusterbomb into choking gas for aoe weakness.

Resouled.5614:

Well, since you’re GC you don’t want to be in melee range. So you want to be ranged and thus I chose LB.

They can send a mesmer or thief to quickly dispose of you even if you are in range because with Blink or shadowstepping they can get on top of whichever structure you are and 3-shot you.

Wolf.5816:

Every Mesmer build has On demand access to:

-Power based burst.
-One of the most powerful conditions in PvP (confusion)
-AOE Stun…
-Invulnerability, or guaranteed stomp.

Yeah.. I think it’s time they saw a nerf.

Most other professions have to spec down 2 trait lines to gain viable access to a single one of those.

AoE stun? Where?

And since when is confusion the most powerful condition in pvp? With the spvp formula Burning far outperforms it as a condition.

Nikaido.3457:

Zenith.7301:

Hello banners/fury uptime/best vulnerability stacking besides engineer in the game?

Warrior is far from being the only class that has good vulnerability stacking. DPS guardians have pretty decent vuln stacking.
Fury uptime is a great thing to have, but again, if you were to lower the war’s dps to everyone else’s dps, I’m not sure perma fury would be seen as such a great thing overall. If you slow down the killing speed you might benefit more from other abilities and war have nothing but dps like I said. The magic works so well because of the level of damage, if not for it, warriors would be a pretty sad sight.
As for banners, you wouldn’t need more than one war to bring the only two useful banners, Discipline and Strength.

If you nerf the thief’s and warrior damage, all you’ll be doing is create two miserable classes that will be as undesirable as the ranger, and it’ll just be a new era of guardian, elementalist and mesmers.

Warriors do it easier and with less sacrifice.

More importantly, it’s kind of funny how you consider taking only 1 warrior or thief as a damage to the class, when you see no groups with more than 1 mesmer, let alone any other class except a guardian in fractals.

If the change causes you to take 1 per class and consider bringing other class distributions, then it’s good enough for me. Because when group comp is just a token mesmer while stacking 3-4 warriors or 2 warriors 2 thieves and a mesmer, that’s garbage design.

stale.9785:

Furajir.3815:

Ya because I’ll be kitten ed if I’m forced into rolling some type of bow build.

Oh no, a ranger with a BOW? Who’d have thought?

Bows are pretty bad ranged weapons relative to other classes’ ranged weapons.

At least you get kicked from the group because they are WRONG. If you are an engineer or necro or ranger, however, it’s another story — and worse because the kick or unwillingness to take you is actually justified as you ARE significantly increasing clear times for the group.

Nikaido.3457:

Zenith.7301:

Nikaido.3457:

It still does not change the fact that ranger has nothing for itself. Nerf the war and thief damage and people will just stack guardians. If the fight last longer a dps guard still has good damage and much better mitigation.

At no point will the ranger be considered a class as good as any of the others as long as it doesn’t get buffed in PVE. Ever.

And if you think the guard and mes are only useful for the reflection and timewarp you haven’t done much in the way of speedclears. We constantly use the CC, the stability, the protection etc. The reason why warriors don’t ever need to slot balanced stance is because he can trust the guard to use stand your ground when he needs it.

As for grouping trash mob, there is nothing better than focus pull and greatsword pull when you can’t LoS.

A single guardian can bring wall, spirit shield, and stand your ground. You don’t need many. You just stack the classes that do the best damage after you’ve got time warp and a guardian.

Reading comprehension ? I’m saying that if you nerf the war damage there is NO point in bringing wars anymore. If they were to do about as much as a dps guard (which does have decent dps.) why would you not just bring more guards ? You don’t need more reflection but dps guards can do more than bringing reflection. If the fights last longer (by virtue of not having the current level of damage our party can do) a guard can constantly blind mob which is much better than anything a war could do.

Wars only have dps. There is nothing else to the class. Nerf it and you’ll have created a class that is worse than ranger, gg.

Hello banners/fury uptime/best vulnerability stacking besides engineer in the game?

Warriors will be taken if only for the banners, which offer boosts no other class can provide in the game.

Crit damage boost alone is outrageously OP for a single class to have for a group.

And guardians need a nerf as well to utility anyways, considering they are not only second to warriors in the PvE hierarchy, but they are top dog for WvW teams.

jewishjoyride.4693:

The fraction that your pet gets is also increased by boon duration. Looks like you have 25% at least. That’s a pretty nice bump.

I think if you look at fortifying bond being the only source of boons for a pet then it is a little underwhelming. However when you include other sources it ends up being 100% uptime for almost everything along with multiple stacks of might.

It’s pointless, because with fields you can stack any boon just fine, as you can with shouts.

In CoF speed runs you can get 25 might stacks for your pet just fine without this trait.

So, if its only use is with RaO, and might particularly, it’s an underwhelming trait. If it needs group application methods to be good, it didn’t need fortifying bond anyways since at the rates of application in a group this is pointless.

Kasama.8941:

Zenith.7301:

You mean like the insignificant amounts of nerfs that destroyed this class and the necro in beta so even after 8 months these classes remain in a crappy spot throughout the game?

No, I mean every single balance patch we’ve gotten since the release of the game. Beta is beta..

Beta involved “balance patches”. If you want a significant damage nerf, consider engineer grenades getting a whopping damage nerf just because they began to benefit from sigils and stats, yet those stats and sigils did not make up for the % reduction.

You mean like the insignificant amounts of nerfs that destroyed this class and the necro in beta so even after 8 months these classes remain in a crappy spot throughout the game?

Nikaido.3457:

It still does not change the fact that ranger has nothing for itself. Nerf the war and thief damage and people will just stack guardians. If the fight last longer a dps guard still has good damage and much better mitigation.

At no point will the ranger be considered a class as good as any of the others as long as it doesn’t get buffed in PVE. Ever.

And if you think the guard and mes are only useful for the reflection and timewarp you haven’t done much in the way of speedclears. We constantly use the CC, the stability, the protection etc. The reason why warriors don’t ever need to slot balanced stance is because he can trust the guard to use stand your ground when he needs it.

As for grouping trash mob, there is nothing better than focus pull and greatsword pull when you can’t LoS.

A single guardian can bring wall, spirit shield, and stand your ground. You don’t need many. You just stack the classes that do the best damage after you’ve got time warp and a guardian.

Yeah, ranger needs buffs, but you’d need to buff all classes to match warriors and thieves, which won’t happen for obvious spvp reasons. If something like mesmers or eles get damage increases the spvp people will wail for the next century.

Yup, I checked the wiki immediately when I noticed that the boon I had hoped to apply to my raven while testing it on mobs was only a tiny fraction of Call of the Wild’s duration.

There’s no reason to make it a fraction of the duration, but I’m sure there is some perverted logic to be found to explain this trait behavior.

The tooltip is still misleading.

Just an fyi for those of you out there. It gives a couple of seconds of duration of the boon, not what you actually get in duration. It also does not share stability.

Just for those of you curious about running a build with 10/25/10/25 build for 10% damage with full endurance, 10% from flanking, and 5% with boon up. Going into the traitline seemed interesting for Fortifying Bond but it’s actually a waste compared to putting those points in BM.

fakeblood.2576:

Why run this when a BM ranger is just as effective yet way more survivabilty ?

BM rangers don’t have aoe. BM rangers don’t burst unless you’re willing to call an AI tied, pathing attack that takes a couple of seconds to deliver half a shatter’s damage “burst”.

Dojo.1867:

Zenith.7301:

SoS is a 64 sec cd with trait. You’ll be getting nuked much more often than that. You have no teleports like thief or ele or mesmer, or stealth to drop targets from focus fire. While your SoS is on cd you have 180 less toughness on a glass cannon spec.

All your burst cooldowns are still upwards of 45+ seconds, and when your signets are not up you are doing crappy burst/damage compared to other builds. You sacrifice tons of survivability in order to only benefit half of the damage equation, since your pet is the other half of your damage and does not benefit from that gear change that just cost you a lot of survival.

A counterattack every 15 seconds isn’t going to save you from group focus fire while signet of stone is on cd.

You don’t get focussed all that often to be honest because you operate on range. And the tools you have are usually enough to disengage in a way that they waste a ot of time if they want you down.

Burst cooldown on 45 seconds? What do you mean with that? While boosting your damage to the maximum by activating everything is fun this isn’t necessary at all. Your weapon skills hit like a truck by themself on low cooldowns.

Again all my knowledge comes from actually playing this build over 100+ matches now and it works surprisingly well.

Kharr.5746:

Maybe using sword + dagger instead of GS would help increase your survivability? The 2,3 and 4 skills offer extra evades. If you time those well with dodges, you can stay up against focus fire much better.

The survivability is about the same with the evades. The way you play the build GS somehow works better for most situations, it is hard to explain. For example when you barrage a point from offpoint if you start taking too much damage the biggest part of it will still be ranged and the blocking works well. And while you have to be careful of when to actually go into melee hiltbash, maul and the GS autoattack chain outdps sword+x. Especially with Moment of Clarity.

The biggest problem I see people having with this build is that in their mind they directly compare it to bm/trappers and how it would perform in the same situations. The thing is that it plays completly different and is closer to thieves or warrior. You shouldn’t even come into these situations. When you dps a point you are actually most comparable to a direct DPS version of a grenade engi.

Again I would especially be interested if someone actually tested it in turney matches. This isn’t so much about discussin the theory behind it.

If they want you down, they will get you down. You think they’re gonna let you or any clusterbomb thief just merrily bombard a point with aoe without sending a mesmer to toss you down or kill you off the spot?

Nikaido.3457:

Zenith.7301:

More than boosting the ranger I just think thief and warrior damage need nerfing.

No. Warrior and Thief are definitively dps classes, they don’t bring much utility to the group (and with all the nerf on stealth and even revealed while dropping bombs..), these classes would make no point if you dropped their damage to the level of a dps guardian. It would just make guardian even more OP than it is as a dps guardian can still deal decent damage and has so much support it’s not funny.

Ranger is also a dps oriented class. It’s just that the whole class mechanic and pet is broken. You can see it in a lot of the buffs the ranger can give to the group and himself, it was meant for dps, it’s just broken when it comes to actually dishing it out.

Ranger is so strong in PVP partly because the pet won’t die half as much (or at all) and there is little need for cleave in tournaments. In PVE the class is broken. Even if you nerf thief and warrior damage, ALL of the other classes would STILL be a better pick than a ranger. I would still take a guard, ele, necro, anything over a ranger. Ranger needs a buff.

Nothing matters in this game besides damage. You just need one guy for reflection and time warp, and there’s no point for a non-“dps oriented class”.

You don’t stack guardians. You don’t stack necros. You don’t stack engineers. You don’t stack elementalists.

You stack warriors and thieves. Because damage is the most valuable utility in the game.

So when warriors and thieves blow everyone out of the water, there IS a problem.

Yeah good luck spiking something that dropped targets when most attacks in the game require a target or are a directional projectile.

And they marginally reduced the cast times of f2 and called it a triumph, which is a total farce.

Still try to land any drake’s breath that isn’t the river drake on a moving opponent, or try to land a moa screech.

A 13 sec cast mighty roar for 5 stacks of might for 10 seconds versus an instant shout, what the hell. Ditto for a cast time wolf howl for group regen, so the pet sticks in place doing nothing just to give a boon to people that other classes can give instantly while doing something.

PsionicDingo.2065:

Puandro.3245:

Engels.8537:

Xsorus.2507:

If you’re thinking a Ranger is bunker because of Signet of the Wild usage then you’re doing it wrong.. Cause i use Signet of the Wild in most of my builds, simply because we don’t have a whole lot of options… Bout only build I don’t see it ran in is Trap Builds.

Even Mango Pie isn’t completely horrible for a Zerker Ranger

Anyway, I’ve ran into maybe 2 or 3 Bunker Rangers the entire time i’ve played….

No, I was being sarcastic, sorry.
I don’t really understand the point in saying that pretty much nobody runs BM builds now, specially coming from the people who have spread the builds on the forums the most. Maybe trying to prove that it’s an incredibly unused build so Anet shouldn’t nerf it? I don’t know.

You still call it a nerf when they fixed pet’s F2 reseting on swap, so probably “nerf” has different definitions for us.

We arent lying when we say BM Bunker Rangers are none existant. The build is good for 1v1 or small scale fights (5v5 tops). More than that and the pet isnt that great and your ability to soak damage so your pet can kill is irrelevant. People who do small scale fighting as their main source of WvW is extremely low. Then the people who pick rangers tk do it is lower. Then you have those people deciding if they want to run the build.

State of the Game is focused on SPVP. Not WvW. As you note with the 1v1 and small scale fights, that’s why pet damage and leashing is a major concern of the show and it’s hosts.

In spvp a BM bunker cannot move a bunker ele out of point. He can debunker a bad guardian, but a good one will hold out fairly long enough for assistance to arrive.

There are simply very few top teams where a BM bunker is included.

In all my tpvp queues I’ve seen more eles and mesmers and guardians than anything else.

But mesmer and thief GC builds are not garbage in teamfights, and in some team comps neither are GC Scepter eles.

It’s specifically the classes with crappy or few active defenses like the ranger or warrior or necro.

If you notice why mesmers and thieves can run GC successfully is because teleports, stealth, and distortion all allow them to stay on the offensive without risking damage to themselves. So they can stop spike attempts on them by resetting with stealths or teleports and then with stealth/teleports of their own and in the case of the mesmer distortion they land their spike.

Mesmers can spike pretty much every 12 seconds in addition to the phantasms. They have the highest amount of spike attempts. Thieves have the highest spike in a small time window with backstab and they can land that spike safely due to how broken stealth is in terms of offensive and defensive benefit.

SoS is a 64 sec cd with trait. You’ll be getting nuked much more often than that. You have no teleports like thief or ele or mesmer, or stealth to drop targets from focus fire. While your SoS is on cd you have 180 less toughness on a glass cannon spec.

All your burst cooldowns are still upwards of 45+ seconds, and when your signets are not up you are doing crappy burst/damage compared to other builds. You sacrifice tons of survivability in order to only benefit half of the damage equation, since your pet is the other half of your damage and does not benefit from that gear change that just cost you a lot of survival.

A counterattack every 15 seconds isn’t going to save you from group focus fire while signet of stone is on cd.

Haha shadowstep stomp, fun

I can say the same in my server. For some reason most rangers run knight or berserker bow builds, despite the fact that of the two the shortbow is less deficient, and even then I feel the shortbow is pretty inferior to most ranged weapons as it carries no aoe and is our only viable ranged weapon.

There was this one ranger with an offensive shortbow/axe+warhorn build, with his legendary and obviously a fully ascended fractal capacitor, and it amazed me that despite that pve experience he would be using a mainhand axe with a shortbow on a pve build, and that he would run it in WvW as well.

I feel that unless you’re running with a zerg, not bringing the sword or greatsword is suicide.

It is also pretty suicidal to roam as anything but a trapper/BM build. I tried pow/prec/toughness stats and it still gets worn down easily by the meta specs of other professions, so it’s galling that with the only builds we can manage to roam with we’re getting the nerf hammer despite the fact that roaming is a purely recreational ability and wvw success and competition does not value it at all — nobody wants rangers in the real competitive WvW teams because half their damage is on the pet and the pet dies on any encounter with more than 10 people.

More than boosting the ranger I just think thief and warrior damage need nerfing. Thief and warrior base damage numbers just blow everyone else away out of the water, and in a game that values damage above all else for encounter efficiency, that’s a problem.

Even with the guard shout to give the pet 10 secs of protection, the pet still dies. And if you have to recall your pet to you so it doesn’t take the lethal aoe means you just halved your damage while the warrior is doing his full damage with a rifle.

Ranger pets need aoe/cleave damage resistance, period.

Also, boost the kitten spirits. You can start by removing that asinine internal cooldown on the spirit effects you placed in beta considering other classes can apply those boons more frequently to a group with shorter cd’s to boot.

Make spirits cast the aoe effects on your target, not where they are considering most of them are stationary and you want to place them 40 miles away from the action so they don’t die in 2 seconds to a sneeze.

Durzlla.6295:

Zenith.7301:

Durzlla.6295:

Zenith.7301:

If engineers are not reapplying conditions more often than every 48-60 seconds, you face terrible engineers.

Ranger condi removal doesn’t hold a candle to thief, ele, or guardian condi removal.

Thief removal is pretty abysmal dude, they have their heal, and that’s about the end of the list, don’t forget that we have healing spring which removes a condi every 3s for 15s, and the trait that removes 3 condis every 10s, and then we have TONS of regen to counteract them as well.

As for ele and guardian, they’re kinda supposed to be good at it, so idk why you think we should be on par with them, i’d say you’d better off be saying Necro, Ele, or Guardian, not thief, they’re pretty horrendous at removing them, i should know, i play a condi mes and engi it’s funny watching them squirm.

Thieves remove conditions with their heal and every time they enter stealth and every 3 seconds they remain in stealth. For every BP-HS combo they do they wipe off conditions. Shadowstep removes 3 conditions alongside being a double stun break.

Shadow step also has a 50s CD, and what causes them to lose a condi every time they enter stealth? I know about the 3s in stealth one.

That being said they’re still not -that- great at condi removal, they certainly can’t keep up with any of my condi profs and end up with a flag through their chest.

shrugs Rangers just seem like they’re much better at going against condis then thieves, especially seeing as how we don’t have the lowest possible health in the game, and as i said we actually have tons of health regen that mitigates a lot of what the condis can do.

OK, so you’re just ignorant.

The trait that removes a condition every 3 seconds in stealth is one of the many instances of an erroneous tooltip.

The actual trait works by starting the condition removal count the moment you enter stealth, and then 3 seconds after that.

Every time you trigger stealth, you remove a condition. This includes using blast fields like Black Powder with Heartseeker, or using Blinding Powder, or using Shadow Refuge, or even using your stealth heal (the stealth heal will basically work by removing a condition from the trait, PLUS it removes all DoT conditions on top of it).

So between that and Shadow Rejuvenation, the thief can keep himself up and clean. If he’s fighting you as a ranger in particular, he gets further condition removal from his steal utility.

Obviously they should fix the trait so it actually removes only conditions AFTER every 3 seconds you have been in stealth, but that’s not how it’s functioning at the moment, and thus the engineer is the only class that has enough sustained condition application, and aoe on top of it all, to keep any thief with shadow arts spec with conditions.

HGH engineers are really the only condition spec that can kill a shadow arts D/P thief, and to counter that a thief can just run S/D as if you’ve been paying attention to Teldo’s Engineer play it is S/D spammable boon steal and high sustained that has given him trouble.

The only aspect where a thief truly suffers is in a teamfight, and that’s not unique to them considering anyone who’s not a bunker spec or not a mesmer/thief GC spec dies in mere seconds within a team fight. It’s why you don’t see necromancers or GC warriors or GC rangers or GC engineers or GC guardians. Because anyone that doesn’t have myriad teleports/stealth target dropping and several stunbreakers dies immediately as a GC spec.

And other GC specs can’t exist so long as D/P and mesmers exist because they will gib the crap out of you and your burst sequences are much more complex to pull off, have higher cd’s to activate, and the thief/mesmer have more resets/counters to that burst than you can throw at the while gibbing you themselves.

GC spec that isn’t another thief or mesmer is easy pickings for thief and mesmer simply because they have mechanics where they don’t pay nearly the same amount for making mistakes that other classes do.

Durzlla.6295:

Zenith.7301:

If engineers are not reapplying conditions more often than every 48-60 seconds, you face terrible engineers.

Ranger condi removal doesn’t hold a candle to thief, ele, or guardian condi removal.

Thief removal is pretty abysmal dude, they have their heal, and that’s about the end of the list, don’t forget that we have healing spring which removes a condi every 3s for 15s, and the trait that removes 3 condis every 10s, and then we have TONS of regen to counteract them as well.

As for ele and guardian, they’re kinda supposed to be good at it, so idk why you think we should be on par with them, i’d say you’d better off be saying Necro, Ele, or Guardian, not thief, they’re pretty horrendous at removing them, i should know, i play a condi mes and engi it’s funny watching them squirm.

Thieves remove conditions with their heal and every time they enter stealth and every 3 seconds they remain in stealth. For every BP-HS combo they do they wipe off conditions. Shadowstep removes 3 conditions alongside being a double stun break.

If engineers are not reapplying conditions more often than every 48-60 seconds, you face terrible engineers.

Ranger condi removal doesn’t hold a candle to thief, ele, or guardian condi removal.

I’ve been saying for a good while that the conquest format has done horrible things for the game, because it gives artificial value to qualities that don’t work at all in any other format.

Ele scepter for example is very popular in spvp because people fight over a point and eventually they won’t have dodges and eat the dragontooth. That will never happen in any other format where people can simply walk out the circle.

Trapper ranger was called OP in spvp simply because it could cleave into a point well. So was HGH engi.

But have you seen trapper rangers or HGH engis in wvw teamfights or dungeons? Not very often, because people don’t need to sit still on a point for those skills to work effectively.

That format is the reason we’re not seeing changes to ele scepter, or any ranger build for that matter (because people stay in a point and eat pet damage to maintain the point), or any kit changes for engineers or any changes for necromancers in dungeons (supposedly their damage is good, harr harr).

In WvW hammer warriors are some of the most desirable builds for team fights. In dungeons they reign supreme. But in spvp, because they have to sit in a point and eat condition bombs, they are considered poor terrible souls in suffering. Well, once they buff their uptime and condition clear, you’ll see how they will be back to how they were in beta. Even with 2.2k toughness roaming around, warriors would consistently crit me for 5k on whirlwind and even 6k on an eviscerate or 100b if I got CC’d by somebody else. Their autoattacks on axe by themselves do pretty ridiculous sustained damage, and once they allow them to stay on targets more warriors will have strong viable spvp builds while reigning in the two other formats.

But rangers and necromancers and engineers get to shine in a few select conditions of spvp and wvw, while nobody wants them for dungeons, and they obviously must be nerfed.